


For Each Remembered Name

by FeoplePeel



Category: Scrubs (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Past Perry Cox/Ben Sullivan, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sharing a Bed, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-08-02 03:23:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16297265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeoplePeel/pseuds/FeoplePeel
Summary: J.D.’s book was full of names others called him. In English and Vietnamese and diminutives he’d never get back.





	1. Chapter 1

J.D. couldn’t remember the first words he said to Perry.

They met at Camp Holloway in 1965. J.D. knew him then as Sergeant Cox, promoted from Specialist after the Battle of Ap Bac, two years before J.D. had shipped over, and the quiet, angry alcoholic reminded him of Kirk Douglas with that square chin and those deep lines in his face. But _Lonely are the Brave_ had been the last movie he saw in the cinema, so he would admit to a bias if anyone asked.

He’d probably said something stupid if they asked about that, too. A joke that sounded just brave enough to show how shit-scared he really was. Two years into his own deployment now, he could recognize that sort of joke. Lonely are the brave, he thought sourly.

Anyway, he couldn’t remember the first words he said to Perry, but he remembered the first words Perry said to him, face red as he threw himself from the side of the UH-1, boots slapping against the ground and stomping past two privates and another specialist to reach him. He couldn’t have heard any of it; the growl, the thick-soled boots, the laughter of the others that was a mix of pity and relief it wasn’t them he was coming for. He _couldn’t_ have heard because the propellers had started spinning by then. But his memory had been funny since ‘Nam and J.D. would swear on his life he had.

“You wanna be a comedian so bad, let’s see about transferring you to the 9th. I hear the Donut Dollies are recruiting.” He’d dragged him towards one of the barracks, likely his only plan to put him on a separate bird. “And I’m sure as hell not letting you get these men killed.”

J.D. remembered it so well because that night he slept, restless with anger, in the officers barracks. When the mortars fell hard for five minutes that felt like forever, he was outside of their reach. He sat up in bed, heart rate slowly climbing to a now familiar beat more suited to power a horse on a racetrack. But, and he wished he remembered who told him this, a doctor needs their heart delicate and quick and brave. He felt he already had two of those things. That night in Pleiku helped him along towards the third.

Sergeant Cox appeared at the door to the barracks and J.D. fell in line. They saved at least ten men apiece that night, but with seven dead and over a hundred wounded, the Sergeant pulled out a bottle with a peeling label and offered it to J.D. with a grim smile.

Before they shipped out to Qui Nhơn two weeks later, J.D. restocked his med kit and traded his last magazine for a bottle of whatever they had finished.

“This for me, Dolly?” Perry took it from him without thanks. “You shouldn’t have.”

J.D. remembered what Perry said because any time after, when he felt the urge to shove him face first into a rice paddy or when he heard a cherry talk about how little Sergeant Cox cared for his men, the words _I won’t let you get these men killed_ washed over him like napalm.

And he remembered the tired look on the other man’s face as he bent over body after body, lines in his cheeks somehow deeper, like trenches. The sharp taste of rice liquor and defeat.

* * *

J.D. let his mother answer the phone when she was home. The ringing didn’t bother him as much these days, but it was never for him and, if it was, it was rarely good. When she appeared at his shoulder, hand outstretched and expression wary, he tensed. She pulled her hand back and smiled, tugging at the wrinkles around her eyes.

“John, there’s someone on the phone for you.” She motioned to the door. “He said he’d wait.”

 _But it’s very rude to make him,_ he finished for her. She’d gotten very good at not finishing her sentences, which he appreciated. They’d done a lot for one another since he’d come home and Dan hadn’t, or at least they used that excuse. He wasn’t sure either of them knew what else to do.

“Thanks, Mom.” He stood from his desk and moved into the kitchen, dropping a kiss across her cheek as he passed her.

He stared at the off-white phone, waiting patiently on its cradle. Who would they be calling about now? Who else did he _know_? He poured a glass of water, pulled a chair to the wall and picked up the phone.

“John Dorian speaking.”

“J.D.?” The voice on the other end sounded familiar enough to stir some happy feeling in J.D.’s stomach, his hand clenched tight around his glass. “Vanilla Bear?”

“Turk?”

In Vietnam, J.D. collected nicknames faster than diseases. He kept a journal with all they called one another, only thinking to start it after passing off Woody, a clumsy Private Second Class named Doug who brought three men from the edge of an infectious death. They’d absorbed him in Da Nang and lost him to the 1st Cavalry a short time later, and no one remembered his last name.

Christopher Turk went through two years of college and all of basic with J.D., and only stayed on with the 4th Infantry to teach suturing to a group of teenagers that would go on to hopefully know how to tell a man’s ass from his elbow. Otherwise, he would have been at Camp Holloway that night, J.D. thought. He may have been an eighth body. The places his mind went.

“Hey, man!” Turk laughed, breaking through J.D.’s maudlin train of thought. “I made it home for Christmas!”

J.D. laughed, too, the sound feeling strange and unfamiliar. His mom popped her head into the kitchen, saw him with his crazy grin and, in her own state of half-lunacy, smiled back and ducked from the room.

“When?” J.D. relaxed his grip, settling back into his chair. “I mean, when did you get home?”

“Pulled out about five months after you. So, four months?”

“I think I slept.” He leaned forward to set his water on the table. “For Christmas,” he clarified.

“Sorry it took so long to get in touch.”

J.D. made a noise of understanding. Reintegration was…he looked around at the kitchen that was _entirely_ his mother’s. The nine months he’d been stateside he’d spent, largely, here and until very recently in his own room. “I get it. I’m just glad you’re home.”

Turk sighed into the receiver. “You moved back to Ohio?”

“It’s not permanent,” he replied on automatic.

“Whatever you need, man.” Turk’s own reply was rushed and reassuring. “Just thought you’d like to know that the longer you stay out there the more likely it is Carla’s going to come and bother you to death.”

J.D. pressed the phone into his knee and bent over double with sudden relief. He knew Turk was alive, had checked every other week to make sure, even if he never followed up to see where he was. But Carla…

He met Carla at Camp Holloway, too, though she’d left for Qui Nhơn the week before he had. It was a coin toss whether she was going to be one of those Americans hurt or killed when they landed to see the wreckage the VC had left in the city, but there she stood between two beds and that familiar long-suffering look.

“You’re late.” She’d thrown a mess of bloodied bandages at Perry and he had thrown back the first real smile J.D. had seen on the man’s face. She was the only one who could talk to the Sergeant like that that J.D. had met so far, and she called J.D. ‘Bambi’.

“I was afraid to ask about her,” J.D. pulled the phone back up to admit.

“It’s all good,” Turk said softly. “She’s good. She’ll be happy to see you again.”

“Yeah,” J.D. wiped at his eyes, taking in the kitchen again and wondering what it would look like under Carla’s careful, nurturing influence.

“Actually, uh,” Turk said, tone reticent, “we were wondering if you could make it up next week.”

To his credit, J.D. didn’t balk. “What’s happening next week?”

“They’re breaking ground at a new hospital in the area. I’m a part of the surgical team,” he said. “Thought you might want in on the ground floor.”

J.D. stood to find a piece of paper and a pen, eventually locating one in the knick knack drawer next to the silverware. He flinched as the odds and ends banged against one another and slammed the drawer closed too hard. It’d be stuck later. “What’s the place?”

“Sacred Heart,” Turk said. “Chief of Medicine, Bob Kelso.”

“Who do I need to get in contact with?”

“Oh,” Turk’s laugh was closer to a snort. “You’re going to love this.”

* * *

His mother settled, once assured he wasn't deploying again. Was leaving for a safe job in the States, with good pay, and where she could still call him. She even helped him pack his bags with a little smile on her face. It was the happiest J.D. had seen her in months.

The flight from Ohio to California was six hours. It was over two hours from where he went to college, but the weather was a familiar, welcome warmth without the oppressive humidity that exuded from foreign leaves. He visited the cemetery first.

“Sorry I haven't been by,” he told the headstone he’d come to see. He’d tended to the body himself and knew the coffin they sent home had all been for show. For his sisters and the watchful eye of the American public.

“I sent Jordan money for the funeral. She was so mad,” he laughed. “But, you know, I don't think I'd recognize her otherwise.”

He squatted, knees forced out into a jaunty angle as he lay his weight on his ankles, and pressed a thumb across the first three letters of the name etched there.

_B-E-N_

Benjamin Sullivan was a reporter when J.D. met him outside of Da Lat, where he was interviewing Turk about his involvement in the Battle of Ia Drang. J.D. had been so busy throwing himself at Turk like an excited child that it took him the length of a half-minute to notice his Sergeant was doing the same with the stranger beside them.

A childhood friend, Ben explained, when Sergeant Cox wouldn’t. A _best_ friend, and much easier to get along with than anyone who claimed that title had any right to be. Sergeant Cox’s best friend was someone who ought to be rough and mean and as ornery as he was, J.D. remembered thinking. But the Sergeant smiled around Carla, and he had been softer than he probably wanted to be towards J.D. lately. And with Ben he relaxed, joking like they weren’t in the middle of a war and as like to die tomorrow as they were last week. He acted like a human.

Ben was there to bring the war home, but he had a magnificent gift for drawing out just a little bit of decency wherever he went.

“What's that? Diary?” Ben bounced on J.D.’s cot, hip stuck out at an angle, expression teasing. “J.D., tell me who you like.”

J.D. tucked his book, filled with mostly gossip and of course the names, under his armpit. It didn’t take long for Ben to annoy him into letting him look at a few pages. For all the nice things J.D. remembered about Ben, he was also childish, regardless of circumstance, in a way that drained energy faster than a fitness test.

“Here,” Ben said, pulling out his pen and etching something in the lining of his book. “In case the crotchety bastard never lets you close enough to read his dog tags.”

J.D. leaned back on his elbows to read what he had written. It was beside _Sergeant Percival Cox_ , no surprise.

 _Ulysses_. J.D. finally understood why the General called him U-Boat. It was a nice middle name. He couldn’t say, at that point, if it was fitting. He’d retained next to nothing about the Odyssey and he’d taken one look at James Joyce’s work and walked on.

“You really want to get him worked up, you should call him Shirley,” Ben suggested, pointing to Perry’s name again. “You’ll understand when you see his hair grow out.”

“The point isn’t to get him to hate me more, Ben.”

“Ah, he doesn’t hate you.” Ben punched his shoulder. “Trust me.”

“What about you?”

“Why would _I_ hate you?”

“I meant your name, wiseass.”

“Wiseass works,” Ben grinned. “Everyone here calls me Click on account of the…,” he trailed off waving his camera. “My sisters call me Benji.”

In J.D.’s book of names, he had written Benji for Jordan and Danni. It felt blasphemous now that they had no one to answer when they called it.

Jordan told J.D. once, two wine glasses into the evening, that they’d thought Ben following a combat medic had been the safest way for any reporter going into a war, mitigating his bad habit of rushing off and finding trouble. What she hadn’t known, what Perry hadn’t or couldn’t tell her, was the hell they met at every Dust Off. And however bad they were about putting themselves in dangerous situations, Ben had been worse.

Ben spent a year with them; eating, making camp, learning stories and new names. And at the end of it all was Operation Attleboro.

Operation Attleboro, where Ben shouldn’t have been anywhere near a VC tunnel, or the tunnel shouldn’t have been allowed to get as close as it had.

There were ten more men J.D. should have been helping while Ben’s arm fell apart between his fingers. He couldn’t make out the features on his face anymore, but he carried him off the field anyway. And Sergeant Cox...Perry was...

“J.D.?”

Perry was standing behind him, a bouquet of small, white flowers in one hand. J.D. stood with a small grunt and, before he could think better of it--in honesty, before he _had_ thought--he pulled the man into a tight embrace.

Perry froze underneath his arms, flowers tapping lightly against J.D.’s thigh. “It’s good to see you, kid,” J.D. heard the words come out as a choked sound beside his ear.

“You too,” he said, down into the other man’s collarbone. And it _was_ good. Perry was talking. He looked healthier than when...J.D. stopped his thoughts abruptly and pulled away making sure he could see Perry’s face, whole and mostly unscarred.

And because the brain tended to focus on silly things when overwhelmed with emotional stimulus, his next giddy thought came in the sound of Ben’s voice, intrusive and trivial: _You’ll understand when you see his hair grow out._

Perry must have been thinking along the same lines because his next words were, “That what you look like with hair?”

“ _Me_?” J.D. reached up to tug on a loose curl by Perry's ear. “What are these?”

“Watch it,” Perry took a step back, slapping at his hand with a laugh. “I may not be your commanding officer anymore but I can still break those fingers.”

J.D. didn't think he ought to mention his own promotion to Sergeant, the fact that they were on the same level now, in light of the fact that Perry probably _could_ break his fingers.

“Jordan said you’ve been sending her money,” Perry lifted his flowers, palming them in the other hand with a half-hearted smack.

“I was just telling Ben,” J.D. said, the name falling heavier than the headstone beside them. “Funerals are expensive. We’re still paying for Dan’s.”

Bringing up Dan was a good way to stop any ‘you don’t owe me' conversations, he found. They all owed one another something; that this was how J.D. paid his dues was up to him.  

“She's going to be insufferable until she pays you back. First big gesture she offers, I suggest you take it.”

“Roger-dodger.”

“...your mom okay?” J.D. gave Perry a look he hoped the other man understood. By the way he scrubbed at his face, he had. “Then what are you doing here, Dolly?”

“If you'll believe it I was actually coming to look for you,” J.D. said, and watched Perry’s left eyebrow climb. “Turk called.”

“Fair enough.” Perry crossed his arms, plastic around the flowers crinkling. It looked uncomfortable and comforting. “That hospital’s going to need doctors who give a damn. And you know me, I've never been good at that touchy-feely hands-on shit.”

“That's not true,” J.D. said, earning him a surprised look. “You taught me...everything.”

Perry snorted. “ _That's_ not true.” He unwound his arms from the tight position they had made their way to, and took a tentative step forward, hand landing on the side of J.D.’s shoulder. “Let’s get lunch, sometime.”

“‘Course.” J.D. shot him a weak smile. “Whenever you want.”

J.D. made his way out of the cemetery to give the other man some privacy, only catching the first few strains of conversation as Perry knelt before the headstone, himself.

_“Of course all it'd take was was one phone call from Baldy to convince the kid--”_

Turk had a glut of nicknames for the others and none he gave J.D., _save_ J.D., ever stuck. But he’d taken to calling Perry, _Old Man,_ and that one caught. When Turk came home Carla was already in California, close to Perry and Jordan, and for as much as the two of them busted one another’s balls overseas, J.D. could say with relative certainty that Turk had been happy to have the Sergeant nearby.

Perry’s names for J.D. were more popular, even if (by virtue of rank or respect) he was the only one who was allowed to use them. Dolly, Betty, Janice, Newbie. Occasionally, when they were in a tight spot, he called him Kid, as Ben so often did.

J.D.’s book was full of names others called him. In English and Vietnamese and diminutives he’d never get back.

* * *

“You’re staying with us ‘til you find a place,” Carla's tone brooked no argument. J.D. smiled into his plate of spaghetti, shifting slightly when Turk punched his shoulder.

Afterwards, he unpacked his single bag in a small guest room, sparsely decorated and colored a beautifully light blue. It would suit perfectly as a child’s room one day he thought absently, setting his clothes into an old drawer that scrapped on one side as he pulled it in and out, paint flaking off on his fingers.

“Like it?” Carla said, turning from the room to stare out of the window. “Best view in the city.”

J.D. joined her, staring out across a landscape that was, unmistakably, Americana. “Love it.”

In the early days of the war, J.D. could pause. He remembered eating a meal that wasn't with his hands and stopping to look at the foreign make of the foliage, in some ways tainted by what he'd already seen, but still beautiful.

There was a restaurant in Tây Ninh where Carla dragged him to a window table for the best view. Two hours later, J.D. was drunk enough to enjoy the sunset for simply being a sunset, and Turk joined them, pocket weighted with a future promise he had only told J.D. about.

J.D. wandered back to base, towards the smell of chemical exhaust and the musty preservatives clinging to every man’s fatigues. There were dancing girls in silver shorts that reminded him of home. One wore an elaborate mesh contraption that fanned above her head like a peacock. He wondered what she'd made it with.

Perry was still Sergeant Cox, then, though J.D. had tested the name Perry with varying levels of success. He’d fared better on those occasions than when he tried any variation on his name--Percival and Per--or the one time he’d jokingly called him by his middle name. Mostly, back then, he called him Sarge.

Perry was kissing Ben just inside one of the two big red buildings near the burned husk of land where the vehicles were parked. It wasn’t a horribly unusual sight, though people tried to be more discreet about it. J.D. thought he couldn’t consider Perry a Sergeant in that moment; it filled him with a hollow melancholy. That was a kiss that should have happened during a more civilized time. Like the ring in Turk’s pocket, which was honestly the reason J.D. had drank so much that day.

Ben made jokes, and Perry kissed him, and Turk and Carla fell in love. J.D. was sick with the sadness of it.

It wasn’t a passionate kiss, just a goodbye before Ben was meant to meet the 196th Light Infantry Brigade for Operation Attleboro. J.D. turned and walked around the entire building, passing by the grumpy ammunitions officer and the girls with their shining clothes, who smiled at him in a language he didn’t understand beyond the words for ‘doctor’ and ‘help’.

Two days later, Carla and Turk were married in Tây Ninh. Perry never kissed Ben again.

* * *

“So, Doctor Dorian, why do you want to work at Sacred Heart?”

Robert “Bob” Kelso was a World World II vet who had met Perry at Jacobs Medical Center after the back half of Con Thien ground their troops to meat and Operation Kentucky had taken the solid foundation of Sergeant Cox’s leadership away from J.D.. Kelso agreed to take care of Perry when he’d driven everyone else away, Jordan said.

“I want to help people, sir,” J.D. told him. The war had taken an entrenching tool to much of his previous self--his belief in God and in himself, what it meant to love someone, and how well he held his liquor--but that singular fact hadn’t changed; he wanted to help people.

Kelso nodded, if not pleased than understanding. “I’ve told you the mission of this hospital and your references speak highly of you. I think you’ll be a decent fit here,” he said. “By employing doctors such as yourself what I hope to offer, that other teaching hospitals cannot, is advancement in a different field of medicine.”

“I specialized in internal medicine,” J.D. smiled, a self-deprecating twist of the lips. “Not exactly an uncommon practice.”

“I read your resume, Dorian, I know what you studied,” Kelso snapped without any real heat behind it. “You know, the Germans stuck me in Stalag VII-A after the Battle of the Bulge. I was only there for half a year, but I thought…,”

He rubbed a hand down his face. J.D. waited.

“When I met Perry, I thought I’d be able to help him. Maybe I did, but my experience is clearly limited.” Kelso leaned back in his chair. “The men who come back the way he did are going to need, well, men like him. And you.”

“I don’t know what I can do for them but I’ll certainly try.”

“That’s what I like to hear, sport! Learn as you go.” More seriously he added. “I’m a difficult man to get along with. I’m telling you this now because I want you to know that, even when it doesn’t seem like it, I do believe that a teaching hospital is as much for the doctors as it is for the patients.”

“You’ve not said anything I disagree with, sir.”

“Don’t worry that’ll soon change,” someone spoke from behind him, a sharp female voice that was familiar to him. J.D. half-turned in his seat, losing sight of the woman as she stepped behind his chair, and catching her again when she leaned against the desk beside him. “Hi Bob.”

“Doctor Dorian, I think you're acquainted with one of our board members, Ms. Jordan Sullivan.”

“Hi, Jordan,” J.D. couldn’t sit up straighter, but he pushed his feet back to try. He was sure she couldn’t _actually_ smell fear, but the expression on her face made him doubt.

“D.J.,” she smiled, making her look a little softer. “Perry said you were in town.”

J.D. opened his mouth, apology ready on his lips. For not calling ahead, or writing at least, but he wasn’t sure their relationship would stand up to something like that. Jordan was the most prideful woman he had ever met, and apologies were something he had no idea how to approach with her. In the end he simply nodded.

“You’re done with him, Bob,” Jordan pushed away from the desk, walking towards the door without a backwards glance. Kelso followed her with his eyes and a frustrated grunt. J.D. stood, unsteady then, when Kelso showed no signs of stopping him, reached out to shake the man’s hand.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing what you can do, Dorian.”

Jordan hadn’t waited for him, already twenty paces ahead in the hallway and continuing her trek towards the hospital door. He only counted himself lucky that she didn’t speak until he caught up with her.

“You have a place yet?”

“I'm living with Turk and Carla until I find something.”

“Here,” She dug through her purse, locating a small business card and sticking one of its sharp corners into the palm of his hand. J.D. winced, taking it gingerly between two fingers and examining the writing on the front. “The superintendent of our building owes me a favor.”

“I’m _fine_ , Jordan--”

“D.J.,” She cupped his face with a hand, slapping it twice with a firmness that dug her nails in behind his earlobe. “I'm taking care of this.”

He’d only met Jordan in person once, two months after Perry was airlifted out of Con Thien. He was there because he’d found out from one of his officers that Perry was alive, though it wouldn’t feel real until he saw him for himself. J.D. was standing outside of the man’s room when a woman only slightly smaller than himself rushed him until he was pressed against a wall and unsure of how he got there. Ben described his older sister as ‘fun to tease’ and ‘a woman who could have led a battalion of men into battle without blinking’. J.D. agreed with the latter assessment.

“You know Perry?”

“Yes ma’am, he’s my Sergeant,” he answered, feeling like he had to. “I’m Specialist Dorian.”

“Don’t call me ma’am.” She stepped away, suddenly a familiar-looking worn down. He saw it in the faces of the women in Da Lat and Saigon; those waiting officials in rich-looking fabric. Waiting for news, waiting for sons, waiting for it to be over. Those in the villages farther out didn’t wait, they fought, and dug trenches and carried bodies from the battlefield. They cried too, but they had harder lines after.

If Jordan were in Vietnam, he thought, she wouldn’t wait. She would fight and cry and scream.

“He was in a coma for a month after he came home,” she said, staring at the door like it would form the words she wanted to hear. “No one would tell me what happened. As though I couldn’t cut all their salaries in half.” She cupped her elbows in her hands, raking him through with a sideways glance that was angry and sad and begged him for answers now. “Tell me why he’s not talking to me.”

His training launched him into motion and he led her to a nearby chair, guiding her to sit by the shoulders as he forced the automatic _Ma’am_ to hide behind his teeth. “Ms. Sullivan, I was there. I can tell you what happened, if you really want to know.”

“I do, Specialist...sorry, did you say Dorian?” She looked to her knees, eyebrows pulled together. He nodded. “J.D.?”

J.D. knew that Ben wrote to Jordan whenever he could. Perry had, too, after Ben died. J.D. wondered how much she knew about him.

She stood, brushing herself off, face down to hide her eyes. “Let’s get a drink.”

He kept the hospital’s address in his back pocket. For the remainder of the war, when he wrote home to his mother, he spared a page for Jordan Sullivan. J.D. wrote for himself as much as he had her, an easing of guilt and a connection to Perry. He would have never known if she read them, as she never wrote back. Would have continued not knowing until, after one lengthy complaint about his lack of writing equipment, he received a care package containing an overly expensive pen and a stack of stationery with a hospital insignia on every page.

* * *

J.D. didn’t sleep well. The last restful night he remembered was in Đông Hà, before Operation Kentucky.

He spent three hours losing rounds of poker against Turk, not on purpose though he’d claim otherwise, to distract themselves from Carla’s absence. When they’d flown North, she’d followed a detachment south to Chu Lai.  Normally around this time they'd be planning their hypotheticals; R&R, their next trip home, when Turk and Carla would finally have time for a honeymoon. J.D.’s ideas had always come out on top in the last category.

He was staring at the wall in front of him and playing the game with himself now, trying to remember what Reykjavik looked like, when a soft swear at the foot of his bed had him reaching for the knife under his pillow. Logic told him any VC couldn't have made it this far without being spotted, but Pleiku was the reason his fingers were wrapped around the hilt of a blade and he wouldn't withdraw them until he knew for certain.

A warm body crawled into his bed and a hand curled over his, over the knife. Whoever it was knew him. It only took a breath, the smell of whiskey, to recognize the other person as Perry.

He hadn’t said anything at first, just wrapped J.D. tightly in his other arm and seemed to fall asleep almost instantly by the slackening of his hand around the knife. The barracks would be mostly empty for another hour at least, but drunk or no, Perry would need to leave soon.

When J.D. nudged him to say as much, Perry grunted and pushed himself away. J.D. let the knife go and turned as Perry attempted to stand.

“Come on,” J.D. stepped into his boots and slipped an arm under the other man's shoulders, lifting him to his feet. By the time they reached the airfield Perry was struggling to walk on his own and, at the door to his officer’s quarters, he’d just about managed it. J.D. stood in the doorway and watched Perry fall face first onto his bed.

“Shut the door.” Perry half-rolled to stare at him. “Get some sleep.”

J.D. moved mechanically, closing the door behind him, stepping further into the room, and removing his boots. He thought maybe he was supposed to close the door on his way out, and sleep in his own bed. This couldn’t be excused later as a drunkard’s stumbling after all; this made it a choice.

But when he curled up into a ball in the tiny space left on the bed, Perry said nothing, just exuded warmth and the smell of whiskey. It didn't mean anything, but in retrospect it had. It meant a full nights sleep and comfort.

In a bigger bed, in California, he curled around his pillow and tried to forget what came after.


	2. Chapter 2

Propellers spin. Boots land in knee deep water.

_Those spikes had something on them, let's get these guys out of here!_

Propellers spin. Hands hold to the mesh, to the groaning men. Propellers stop, jerk, crunch like a can of pop against the side of a mountain.

_I feel like I'm dreaming, Doc._

The Captain can't die; Doc will be all that's left. The Doc's alone as the sun sets.

He walks until he’s shot. He can't die, he’s the only one left. He knows so many names.

J.D. wakes up.

* * *

J.D. couldn’t say when death, the concept, stopped eating away at him. One of the first things he’d learned in the war was that good people were going to die and how to keep tight to his sanity when it happened, not if. The second thing he’d learned was that he would do whatever he could to save them anyway. It’s what made him good at what he did. It’s why he’d trusted Sergeant Cox. It’s why J.D.’s men had come to trust him.

He did _not_ trust these new machines, the ones that cropped up over his five year absence. It made him seem bad at what he did, and slow. And _that_ ate at him.

“They’re pairing me with some younger model, Dolly,” Perry told him, sandwich held precariously over an open chart. “A war protester.”

He said it the way one said, _Isn’t that nice?_ or _Congratulations, it’s a girl!_ But his face was thundercloud heavy; the storm was about to come at any moment. J.D. shrunk away from the table with a quiet, _Godspeed_ , _sir_ , and prayed for the next person who crossed his path.

Doctor Elliot Reid was one of the few women at Sacred Heart, and the only intel J.D. could scrounge up was that she was rich and someone whose placement Jordan had approved. Still, if there was one person on the staff with the experience to get around Jordan’s tightly knit rules, it would be Perry. So it was no surprise when J.D. found Doctor Reid in their patient’s room, squinting at a mayo-stained chart and utterly alone.   

“I like her,” Carla told him over dinner that night. “She’s a bit of a snob, but she knows her stuff. And she’s got a good heart.”

Turk and J.D. exchanged a fond look. Good hearts went a long way with Carla. Perry had been a verbally abusive, frankly unlikable, alcoholic, but he had a good heart. J.D. was a FNG and space cadet, but he had a good heart. Turk was loud and cocky and going to get himself killed before he could help anyone, but he had a good heart. In Vietnam, Carla collected good hearts to herself as quickly as bandages, until it became a habit.

“I’ll talk to Kelso,” J.D. offered. “Maybe he’ll let her shadow me instead.”

“I can’t blame the old man,” Turk muttered on the way out of the cafeteria the next day, casting conspiratorial glances at a few beaming interns. “You ever get the feeling we’re being watched?”

 _We are_ , J.D. wanted to say, but he didn’t know who could be listening. Didn't matter that a few of them _needed_ monitoring. What teaching hospital made you turn in what amounted to a monthly mental health screening?

He’d tell Turk his more private thoughts later, the ones he kept off of the form.

J.D. broke away from Turk to enter the room of a tall, comatose pilot named Glenn Matthews.  He read through Doctor Reid’s small, careful notes next to Perry’s slopping, illegible hand. Beside him, Carla changed out a bag beside the man’s head.

“Doctor Reid ruled out malaria,” he said, removing the last few pages and affixing the chart back to the side of the bed.

“She said as much morning. I’m taking him off the artesunate now.”

“Once that’s out of his system we can lower the dosage of the mefloquine too.” J.D. stepped around Carla, waving the papers with a weary smile. Malaria he could have handled. Mystery illnesses took more time, especially when he didn’t understand the equipment. “I’m going to walk this down to the lab, let them know we need a LFT.”

The LFT showed a mess of issues, and the guy was positive for Hep C too. Nothing that explained the coma yet, but they could start him on the antibiotic for that at least. In the chart were new test results; a grainy black-and-white image of the man’s brain. This, J.D. knew, would help them the most, but he’d need Doctor Reid to go over it behind him. He stared at his wrist, eyes following the second-hand on his watch as it circled back around to twelve once, twice, three times. His eyes drifted to the slick paper in his hand. He imagined the holes filling up, all white until it reformed itself into the shape of Mr. Magoo.

“Well,” the comical nose and ever-closed eyes wrinkled into an expression of impatience, “go find her.”

“She ran into Perry in the cafeteria,” Carla told him when he asked at the nurse’s station. “She's probably hiding in the supply closet.”

When he found her she was crying or had been. If a soldier with a shot out knee cap couldn’t hide his tear tracks, a doctor with a spot of wounded pride had little chance. J.D. didn’t lack sympathy--she did look pathetic trying to draw herself up in the corner and pretend she’d been searching for some bandages--but he didn’t know how to comfort her either.

“We're paired up because I don't know how to parse these new scans like you do, remember?” He held out the picture of Glenn Matthews’s brain with its Mr. Magoo nose smack dab in the middle to her. “I need you out there.”

“Sorry, Doctor Dorian,” she stuffed a pack of gauze into her pocket to complete the farce, “I just….” Her shoulders slumped. “How did you get him to like you?”

_I wrapped his shoulder during enemy contact. I carried his lover off the battlefield of Tây Ninh. I traded my last magazine for a bottle of whiskey I only enjoyed because it was his favorite._

He didn’t ask why she wanted Perry to like her. He’d done terrible things in that pursuit.

“I don’t think you want to use my method,” he said instead, making twin pistols with his hands. Her eyes widened but she hid her reaction well.

“He told me I don’t _deserve_ to work on Mister Matthews. He thinks I hate the troops.” She pulled out half a box of tissues before shoving her nose into her hands and emptying one nostril, then the other. It was the most normal he’d seen her act. He felt himself relax at the sound.

“Do you?”

“Of course I don’t!” Her shriek was muffled by a half a pound of puffy, white cotton. When she dropped them into a trash can shoved into the corner and turned, her eyes were red and watery again. “My brother died in A Shau Valley, you know?”

No wonder Jordan approved her, he thought, with more rancor than the situation warranted. They all had a lost brother in common.

“I'm sorry, what division?”

“9th Marine.”

“Barrow’s boys.” J.D. smiled slightly, remembering Woody and Duster, flirting with the Dollies at Da Nang Air Base. J.D. helped them pass out coffee, despite Sergeant Cox’s teasing.

 _Might as well earn the nickname, eh, Sarge?_ he said, handing a paper cup to Perry who took it with something close to a laugh.

“They were a big help at the DMZ. Good soldiers.”

“He wasn't even supposed to go,” Doctor Reid hissed, fingers flying to her temples. “Sorry, I’m sorry.”

He held his hands up waving them back and forth in a small, dismissive motion. Outbursts were easier than crying. She slid to the floor with a solid _thunk_ and J.D. followed soon after, turning his body until he could see the exit.

“Your family seems like the kind of rich that doesn’t have to fight. No offense.”

She chuckled, neck craning to stare at the ceiling. “It’s okay. We’re really not.”

“Enlisted then?”

“He enlisted,” she said, defeated but alive. That last feeling, J.D. knew, was the worst part.

Dan was drafted three years after J.D., and went to Vietnam kicking and screaming. He had protested the war, not for the reasons that J.D. used for kindling in newspapers sent from home, or for the reasons people like Elliot had. People with the sudden potential to lose someone, and an equally sudden fire lit inside them.

Dan protested for the simple, and most honest of reasons: he was scared.

It was 1968, and J.D. remembered digesting his brother's fear with a mix of understanding and neediness. Ben was in a cemetery in California, Perry was in a hospital there, too. He had lost so many people and pieces of himself by then, he didn’t want to consider what came next. So J.D. had one too many drinks when he told Dan, during the last conversation they’d ever have:

“I don’t want to go back.”

Dan looked hopeful in a silly, helpless way J.D. wish he could find on some other fool. It was uniquely his brother. “There’s a guy I know,” he said, “...thinks deserting is worth consideration.”

“I don’t want to go back,” J.D. said, hands reaching up to push through the small bit of hair breaking through his scalp. “But I have to.”

“I'm scared, Johnny.”

J.D. raised his face slowly. Their mother had gone to bed hours ago. It was just them and a pack of Old Style from the Topps Discount Department Store.

“ _I'm_ scared,” he said with some force. “I'm out there!”

“I know! I’m telling you, you don't have to be!"  
  
"And I'm telling you I do." J.D. didn't remember pushing away from the table, but he was standing above Dan, breath coming to him in short bursts. "I’m scared, so help me!”

Dan rolled one of the damp, empty cans between his palms. J.D. remembered the clink, clink, clink as it hit the table.

“All right, little brother.”

J.D. had no other siblings. Dan had been the only person who called him little brother and Johnny.

He thought about what he'd say to Dan now, knowing that his brother would be dead in a year. _I’m scared_ , he’d say. _Why didn't you run faster? Run faster._ He’d had those thoughts then, and they should have been louder, but his fear of loneliness was far more violent.

“Doctor Dorian,” Elliot’s voice drew him back. “Are you okay?”

“Call me J.D..”

“I’m Elliot.” She reached forward to offer her hand.

“Elliot.” He took it, surprised at how small her fingers were. “If you want Doctor Cox to like you, just make him see you're not going anywhere and you're good at what you do.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

Like that, her face cleared. “Easy.”

* * *

Jordan stared J.D. down from across the hospital parking lot, waiting for a bright red Pinto to slide by. He stared at his watch; it was almost nine o’clock.

“What are you doing here?” He pushed himself away from the pocket of warmth he’d created on the bus bench as she approached him.

“Meeting a friend. Not you,” she clarified. “Why haven’t you gotten that apartment?”

The apartment in question was on Elm Street, only a few blocks from San Diego’s shiny new civic center. It was closer to the Naval Training Center than Carla and Turk’s apartment, but only by a fifteen minute drive, and he’d have to cross the bridge over North Harbour Drive if he didn’t want to risk the traffic on Pacific Highway. It was something he’d only admitted to himself, but being so close to a bay made him wrong-footed and short of breath. It was an unwarranted anxiety; he’d not fought on the water.

“I called. It’s…,” he tapped his hand against his leg, “really expensive.”

“That's funny.” She crossed her arms. “You didn’t seem to have that problem when you were mailing me envelopes stuffed with cash. Dear Jordan,” she said, voice a clear mockery. “Enclosed you will find the amount of three hundred dollars to be put towards the funeral of Benjamin ‘Benji’ Sullivan--.”

“I get it, I get it.”

“I'm not loaded, but I do well enough. And I’m getting you a steep discount.” She unwound one arm to point a finger at him accusingly. She’d make a great drill sergeant, J.D. thought. She could knife hand with the best of them. “Or hell, kid, get a roommate. Perry lives there, bunk up with him. It wouldn’t be the first time he had to share his things.”

“I wouldn’t call what we had _friendly cohabitation_ ,” J.D. said, ignoring the parts that he had, before, considered just that.

“Suit yourself,” Jordan relaxed against the side of the bench, dark blue dress riding up her thighs uncomfortably high. “How's he getting along with the stick?”

J.D. mentally searched through cataloged medical jargon, nicknames, and everything he'd read in the newspaper. Still, he came up short.

"Doctor Reid," she said, slowly, impatient.

"Getting along with--," J.D. cut himself off with a disbelieving snort. "He's not. He tries not to be in the room with her. I've taken what patients I can."

"So you just let him avoid the problem without even trying. Fantastic." She pressed her hands to the stone armrest and laughed at the street light looming over them. "He's been back home for almost three years. He needs to learn to deal with people out there who think differently than he does."

Perry broke Ben’s camera once, outside of Dầu Tiếng. Stubborn, unshaven, and running on half-rations and double whiskey, he’d come just short of burning the pictures before some emotion resembling guilt had him throwing them in the mud instead. There were too many pictures for J.D. to remember now, though a few clung to his memory like cellophane. A shot of J.D. holding Hillbilly’s head to his chest, while Duster calmly read behind them, a remarkable action in that J.D. couldn’t remember ever having done it. Two mama-sans holding one another and sobbing. A makeshift tent held up between two high sticks, Vietnamese women in knee-deep water and hospital masks. A beautiful guerrilla girl so focused and close to the lens, J.D. wondered how in the devil’s name Ben snapped the photo.

They were not pretty, or heroic, or triumphant. They were recordings, like J.D.’s book, and they were what Ben prized above all else: honest. While Perry didn’t seem to care about these things for himself, J.D. could imagine him looking through the eyes of someone else, even someone close, and wishing they were all of those things they were not, for his men.

 _I won’t let you get these men killed_ , J.D. thought. Dishonesty for the sake of moving forward.

The point was, Perry broke Ben’s camera because dealing with people who disagreed with him had never been Perry's strong suit.

“Wait, Jordan,” J.D. called to her back, halfway across the street now. She straightened her dress back down to her knees before she turned. “Is Perry handing in his evaluations?”

“Oh _please_.”

"Can you--," JD winced. “Will you talk to him?”

She planted her feet more firmly as a white Camaro stopped just short of her, and honked long and loud. “You’ll talk to him about the apartment?”

J.D. nodded.

* * *

J.D. stared at the CT scan of Mister Matthews and waited. For inspiration, a new cartoon, _anything_ to happen. Nothing did.

“You know what I’m going to say.” J.D. half-turned to Elliot.

Elliot whined.

Perry caught sight of J.D. first, but whatever easygoing expression had started to form disappeared when Elliot pushed ahead. Jordan’s words, about letting Perry avoid the problem, came back to J.D. and he shot forward, grabbing Perry’s wrist before he could step away.

“Sergeant!” J.D. recognized his own tone, the one that said, _I don't know what I'm doing and I need your help_. He wanted to swallow it down and burn it in the acid of his stomach, but it was out there for the world to hear. “Doctor Cox, wait. We need a second opinion on Mister Matthews. Please.”

Perry stared at the place where J.D.’s fingers wrapped tightly around trapezium and pisiform. J.D. held out Mister Matthews’ chart, and Perry took it, shoving J.D. aside with a quiet, “Okay, kid.”

J.D. walked double-time to keep up, Elliot hanging back a short distance until they reached Matthews’ room. “Doctor Reid ran a CT scan--,”

“I know what she did, I’m just...trying to find my footing here.”

He held the pages up to the light, one after the other, pausing only briefly, and stopping entirely at the third. Elliot took a tentative step forward.

“What do you think?” Elliot’s voice squeaked. She coughed to clear her throat. Perry brought the image down, between their elbows. “His liver showed early signs of cirrhosis. It’s not unusual for the cerebellar vermis to be atrophied if he’s an alcoholic.” She leaned in closer, head tilted up towards him. “You don’t think so either, do you?”

“Tell the radiologist to run it again.” Perry pressed the page into her shoulder. J.D. watched her fight hard not to stumble back and thought of Jordan with her feet planted in the middle of the road. “ _Always_ trust your gut, Barbie.”

 _Barbie_. J.D. ducked his head to hide his smile. A nickname, he thought and knew they'd be all right. In small doses, at least.

* * *

Perry made a beeline for the coffee in the break room, and J.D. watched from the couch until his cup was full before opening his mouth to speak.

“Buh buh bup!” Perry held up a silencing finger. J.D. took a quick breath in through his nose, brow slowly raising the longer Perry continued to drink.

“Is keeping me quiet really worth a trip to the burn unit?”

“What, this weak shit? Puh-lease.” Perry leaned against the machine, waving his cup, face a bright red despite his words. “We’re starting Matthews on high-dose methotrexate.”

“Tumor, then?”

“Barbie did some more digging when she saw that his bones were all in tip-top shape.”

“He didn’t crash.”

“Negative.” Perry made a cruising motion with his hand palm down, until it settled on the table next to J.D.’s own mug. “Landed nice and easy on an airfield after his supply of Orange started leaking in the cockpit.”

“Doesn’t sound nice and easy.”

“I’m sure he felt better about it then than he does now.”

J.D. let Perry settle next to him on the couch, arms spread wide and curved, like the horns of a water buffalo. “Sorry about the Sergeant thing.”

Perry brought his right arm around to stare into his cup. “Things got worse after I left.”

J.D. couldn’t tell if it was a question or an assessment. In his mind, things had never been better or worse. There had always just been the war. He shook his head. “We lost you after Kentucky. Perry,” he said, waiting for Perry to correct him and only slightly surprised when he didn’t. “I saw you when they put you on that bird. You were...,”

“It’s all right, I’ve read the file. I know what I must have looked like. And if I didn’t, Jordan’s sure to remind me often enough.” Perry finished his coffee with a hard gulp. “Where’d they put you?”

“Saigon, for a while.” He remembered the first unsteady steps back on base after he returned from leave to find Turk had gone south to help at the 523rd Field Hospital. “Carla...,” he swallowed, reaching for his cup. “She stayed up north, in Huế.”

“She never told me.” The skin around Perry’s lips tightened. “She doesn’t talk about it.”

“Can you blame her? Before I came home I thought you were dead. I thought Carla was for longer. Those protestors you hate so much? If I had a choice I might be out there marching with them.”

“You can do whatever the hell you want, Dolly.” Perry’s voice, his whole expression was dead as a shark’s.

“No, I can’t,” J.D. laughed helplessly. “I remember what it was like to read those newspapers Ben sent home. I can’t think I'm the reason one of our boys stumbles.”

“Hell…,” Perry ran a hand through the small hairs at the bottom of his neck. It was an absurdly belated thought, but J.D. found the curls attractive, and infinitely more touchable than the close-cropped waves he’d grown accustomed to over the years.  “Ben would be out there, pinko that he was.”

J.D. chuckled, abruptly aware of the path he’d let his thoughts wander down. “I don't know about that, but he cared about people. And the truth.”

Perry grimaced. “I know.”

“I won't be marching with those ‘America, love it or leave it’, ‘No glory like old glory’ jerks, either.”

“Amen.” Perry clicked their cups together, the ceramic a loud clack without any liquid as a buffer. Then he stood, his eyes on the clock across the room.

“Hey, Perry,” J.D. set cup on the table and his hands on his knees. “I’m thinking about finding my own place.”

“Yeah?” He placed his own cup in the sink, washing his hands and pulling out one too many towels. J.D. understood, the damn thing always got stuck on the first pull. “Good for you.”

“Well, I was talking to Jordan, and…,” J.D. stood, hands moving to his hips. “I mean, rent’s pretty expensive this close to the hospital and I don’t have a car so--,”

“Spit it out, kid, my shift ends in half an hour and I’m pretty sure Ms Ortega is going to have another stroke waiting for you to finish whatever _this_ is.”

She’s not the only one, J.D. thought, steeling himself.

“Do you have an extra room?”

* * *

“You sure about...this?”

J.D. and Turk sat on the roof of the apartment building and stared across the San Diego skyline. New buildings were cropping up, the smoke from the construction a light grey, and not carried on the sound of explosions. And because not all of J.D.’s memories were of the war, he thought of the tall, crowded buildings of Cincinnati. He thought of the hemlock trees of Hocking Hills, and the time he’d gone to Perry’s Victory with Dan during his first leave and brought back pictures of the memorial to show Ben and Sergeant Cox.

Not all of his memories were about the war, but sometimes the good ones folded back into it like a soiled bed sheet.

“I can’t keep mooching off you guys.”

“Yes, you can. We've always looked out for each other, that's not nothing, man.”

Turk was one of two black men in their graduating class. He had not been roomed with the other only because said other was living in an apartment off campus, which was probably the wiser choice considering he could have been the _only_ black man and not knowing what his options were. J.D. was from out-of-state; an easy-to-please Buckeye, just happy to be in Los Angeles and to share a room with someone other than his brother. Turk introduced him to Lucky Lager--a taste J.D. still hadn’t acquired--and J.D. disgusted him right back with Cincinnati Chili. Turk brought him the hour down to Riverside, to meet his mama when J.D. couldn’t afford to fly back home for Christmas. They celebrated the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Turk’s brother whispered to them about Black Panther meetings, an excited tremor in his voice. There was a razor wire tension, cutting through the belly of what everyone was calling progress.

J.D. escaped being arrested his first night out at the Black Cat Bar, only to see it closed three months later, in 1964. It was probably this last piece of news that finally sent him to the enlistment center.

They were going to school to become doctors. At least overseas, with the sewn on patch declaring ‘Medic’, people took one look at them and, whatever other thoughts they had, they expected that. A doctor.

Turk rubbed a hand over his head, looking more agitated with every swipe. “I can't protect you from this.”

“You want to protect me from Perry?”

“Not from him. From that.” J.D. reeled back as Turk punched him square between the pectorals. “That stupid thing in your chest. Short of removing it, which I have considered in a professional capacity.”

“You know when you married Carla....” J.D. bit his lip, unsure of how much he should say. Turk motioned for him to continue, drawing his knees up and winding an arm around them. It felt simple, almost childlike, sitting out in the open air the roof provided, but he always felt less gawky and unselfconscious with Turk. “I was so worried. About both of you.”

J.D. knew from the time he met Carla that she wasn't going home until _she_ felt her job was done. Turk was scheduled for a short leave that almost overlapped the month J.D. came back to Saigon, but Carla had been moved to Huế and they were married, so what could he do but wait.

She stayed for the massacre. She unburied the bodies, and then she came home. Turk waited in Nha Trang, the days preoccupied with surgeries, and sorting dog tags, and no new news. In contrast, J.D.’s concern felt intangible.  

“I know how she is,” Turk said, seemingly caught in his own thoughts. “I asked her to marry me because she’s...intense, you know? Even in the middle of all that shit, I saw her and thought, whatever it is, she’s got it.”

“Yeah, you told me,” J.D. held his head, chuckling at the memory. A drunk Turk espousing Carla Espinosa’s many exquisite qualities.

 _Intense. But not invulnerable,_ Turk told him. He hadn’t thought of Perry, at the time. He was too busy pushing down the tide of dread that came at the thought of love and war and marriage and death. Now, it was his _only_ thought.

“Do you think he knows?” J.D. picked at a flake of rust on the metal by his hip.

“Perry?” Turk raised his head to snort. “You’ve got two options, Vanilla Bear. He doesn’t, which I’m going to be honest, is pretty indecent of you. Or he does, and you’re breaking some kind of _actual_ decency law.”

“I can handle the second one easier.”

“Can you?” Turk’s pitch went up an octave, in a way that resembled his mother’s. “Maybe I haven’t expressed to you how hard it was for me and Carla to get an apartment this close to the hospital.” He paused long enough for J.D. to raise his eyebrows. “It was _hard_ , man! We are decorated, law-abiding people, who heal for a living, and they looked at us like--,”

Turk broke off, lips pressed together tightly. J.D. reached over, clasping Turk’s shoulder with his hand and rocking him until he acquiesced to a sideways hug.

“I’m just saying,” Turk continued, quiet, seeming to pick up every word with surgical precision, “be _careful_.”

“What are they going to do, install cameras in the bedroom? This isn’t Russia.”

“That's it,” Turk stood, breaking fast towards the door. “I'm tagging Carla in. Maybe she can convince you to stay.”

“No, no, no!” J.D. laughed, crisp air catching in his throat as he fought to catch up.

* * *

At Carla’s insistence, he left a change of clothes in ‘his’ bedroom and a toothbrush in the drawer to the right of the guest bathroom sink. He had accumulated more in the few months since he moved to San Diego, but it still only amounted to a paltry three boxes, the heaviest of which included the vinyls and medical texts his mother had mailed to him later.

The apartment Perry lived in was two bedrooms with one shared bathroom, and all of it was varying shades of grey and brown. The only color in the room J.D. could make out was reflected off of objects from the narrow reach of the lamplight.  

When J.D. emerged from his room, it was to the sight of Perry pouring two drinks from a bottle of Old Crow in the small kitchenette. He was practically stuffed into a black, long sleeve turtleneck and dark jeans. J.D. was surprised the man who had rolled his eyes at beatniks would be caught dead in anything resembling their clothing only a few years later.

“Welcome to the neighborhood.” Perry walked what looked like a well-worn path to the couch, a plaid design that must have been Perry’s choice. Jordan had picked most of the hospital furniture, dark velvets, and leathers, and if she helped Perry the way she had J.D., she would never have approved the green and orange beast taking up the center of the living room and fraying at the edges of the cushions.    

“What have you been writing on these?” Perry said. J.D. caught sight of the paper resting next to Perry’s glass on the coffee table and recognized it instantly as the mental health assessment Kelso had been forcing them to fill out and turn in. “I’ve been passing them off to interns, but Jordan's through covering for me.”

J.D. fell back on the couch, surprised at how much it gave under his back. He leaned forward, glancing through the questions despite having them committed to memory by now.

_...trouble getting your breath...heavy feeling in arms and legs...nervousness or shakiness inside…_

_Blaming yourself for things._

“You don’t have to fill in the notes, just mark the boxes. Like, here,” he said, purposely bypassing the first three sections. “Have you, in the last year, had a drink in the morning to steady your nerves or get over a hangover? No.”

“So you lie.”

“I'm not lying.”

Perry picked up his drink. “Well, good for you, Dolly.”

J.D. reached for his own drink, desperately wishing Perry had a television. His mother sold her television, at some point, telling J.D. that it brought some sort of nervous shaking to her hand whenever she heard it on in the other room. When he first returned home, they tried casting for topics in the evenings, before he retreated back to his bedroom and slept another solid thirteen hours. After two weeks, she’d bought another and, as long as they kept away from the news, it was something to do.

J.D. could feel a sweltering discomfort push in around him with each slow sip Perry took beside him and every aborted sentence in his own mind. He downed the rest of his drink and coughed at the burn that bit the top of his mouth.

“Well,” J.D. said, voice raspy and throat hot. “It’s been a long day. Thanks for dinner, and helping with my stuff.” He set his drink down, nodding at it and ignoring Perry’s skeptical gaze. “And the drink. Goodnight, Perry.”

He walked to his room, hesitating and rigid, and threw all of his attention to the noise outside. It was louder this far downtown with the cars and the construction. He pulled out his top drawer, searching for a loose fitting shirt there, not knowing yet if the noise would be for better or worse. He hadn’t slept in Ohio, surrounded by the quiet.

“How long were you in Con Thien?”

J.D. jumped at the sound of Perry’s voice. When he closed the drawer and turned, shirt in hand, Perry was standing just inside his doorway and looking around the room like it was a new offshoot, added while he’d left the house.

“Please?” The nascent Ohioan in J.D. slipped through before he shoved it back with a more forceful. “What?”

“Con Thien? How long were you there?” Perry moved further into the room, tipping records onto their sides and making faces--some sincerely dismissive but, for the most part, approving--until he reaching the end of the bed. “ _After_ they took me off?”

J.D. scratched the juncture of his neck where his collar itched. “Two months?”

“And you thought I was dead?”

“I tried not to think about it,” J.D. said truthfully.

Love was too insidious a feeling to have in the present tense. He’d seen it ravage Perry and put a fear in Turk and Carla that wasn't there before. But love in the past...to _have_ loved someone; that was fuel.

When they airlifted Perry away, J.D. spent the day in unsteady detachment. He wasn't sure how many times he thought 'Perry might be dead now,' or when 'I loved him' joined it. He only remembered proclaiming him dead in the same breath as loving him, cyclical and preterit.

_Oh...he's gone. I loved him and he's gone._

The UH-1 disappeared, the thoughts cycled in and out, then J.D. didn’t _really_ think for two months.

J.D. startled as a dry set of fingers pressed over the back of his own, clutched on his shirt. “I’m not dead, kid.”

“I know.” J.D.’s voice was surprisingly even, given how hard he was squeezing the fabric between his thumb and fingers. Hard enough to hear the cotton squeak. “I found you. Just wish I’d stayed. Wish I could have.”

Perry looked around the room again, his stare more penetrative than assessing, and altogether keen. “No helicopter to drag me off now.” Perry’s head tilted, breath falling like a hot curtain across the bridge of J.D.’s nose, down its apex, to settle in the depression of his upper lip where he could smell liquor and sweet tea. It reminded J.D. of the state fair, that moment before he leaned across the chair of the Ferris wheel and sealed his lips over Kim Rhodes, sixteen and his stomach a bundle of terrified nerves.

“I guess the question is, do _you_ want me to go?”

If J.D. were a responsible person, he’d remember his (implied) promise to Turk to be careful, his night at the Black Cat, and every other reason this was designed by the universe to be a bad idea.

But with Perry leaning in, inches away from his mouth, J.D. thought of the way the other man’s laugh sounded, and how well that shirt fit him. He thought of nicknames just for him and shared rice whiskey.  

J.D. thought of his last good night of sleep.

“No,” J.D. pressed up, tasting candy corn and bourbon across the front of Perry’s teeth. “You can stay.”


	3. Chapter 3

In Vietnam, December snuck up on J.D.. The government airdropped in an entire box of well wishes, including some sealed up Buckeyes from his mom. Not handmade, but it was the thought that counted. He hadn’t told anyone that, back home, he celebrated Hanukkah; no sense in making yourself _more_ of a target, Turk pointed out. He didn’t think it dishonest, at the time, as the only one who ever celebrated at home was him and his dad, who’d left the family the year J.D. started college. For all the logic and reason he tacked on to the things he’d hidden, it never made him feel less deprived.

Between his cot and Turk’s they stacked every can they emptied to make their own shoddy tree. When they were done and relatively proud, Turk took away nine to line up in front, crushing the can in the middle with the toe of his boot. It was the thought that counted.

“Oh, _Johnny_!”

J.D. dropped the copy of _Ulysses_ balanced on his knees and balled his hands into fists. He’d started reading the book to irritate Perry, but so far the other man hadn’t seemed to have noticed. It also turned into an interesting read, which was fortunate for J.D., considering the length of time this game of _Poke the Bear_ was taking.

Perry leaned against the wall, hand held out, phone resting in his palm. “Your mom again.”

“Don’t call me Johnny.”  J.D. snatched the phone with enough force to make Perry whistle.

J.D. braced for a continuation of the current argument, which was where the holidays were to take place this year. J.D. wasn’t dropping another few hundred on a plane trip he’d blacked out during the first go around and he wouldn’t let his mother drive the thirty hours it would take to reach him just so she’d be stuck in a motel for a week.

“Sorry.” J.D. made his way to the living room with a glass of water. “Parents.”

“Yeah, glad mine are dead.”

J.D. let the silence grow into something tense, bordering on uncomfortable. He’d been living with Perry for a month and a half and knew now that that was often better than trying to break it with something clumsy that only earned him a bewildered look.

“Invite her up here,” Perry said, focused on the newspaper resting against one knee. “She can take my room.”

J.D.’s next sip of water became a choking gulp, and Perry set aside his paper to help him raise his arms. Between his idea of a relationship and Perry’s was something that J.D. imagined to be a gaping maw the size of the Grand Canyon. He had seen Perry care about someone, he knew it was _possible_ , but any teasing about the idea so far had been met with a paternalistic condescension that had launched them into angry sex on several occasions.

So, once his airway cleared, J.D. asked: “Where are you going to sleep? Neither of us can fit on the couch.”

“Yeah, no, I remember that failed experiment.” Perry picked his paper back up, surreptitiously tracking J.D. from the corner of his eye. “Paige can’t guilt me into going to church, but she always has a spare room.”

“Paige?”

“My sister.”

Ben wrote to Jordan and Danni, a pretty blonde who was getting married the following spring to a businessman from Colorado. J.D. wrote to his mother and Dan. Perry never wrote to anyone in his family that J.D. saw.

J.D. wiped at his chin with his sleeve. “How did I not know you have a sister?”

“Simple. I don't talk about her.”

_The gap,_ J.D. thought, wondering if this is what Turk was worried about. Here was where J.D. was supposed to ask about her. He could see Perry clenching the paper, bracing for it. J.D. turned back to his glass and took another, tentative sip, felt the body beside him relax minutely.

He would have, six years ago, maybe less than that. Some part of him wanted to now because he loved Perry and wasn’t so disingenuous to pretend he didn’t want to know _everything_ about the people he loved.

A more subtle, pervasive part of him whispered: _But then he’ll ask about Dan. Not because he’s a self-serving collector of other people’s confidences, like you. Just making conversation. Not because he cares about you._

“What are you doing, Dolly? I’ve got twenty minutes before I’m out of here for my shift.” J.D. looked up from his glass of water, wrapped between two hands, to see Perry already at the door to his room, shirt lost somewhere between the couch and where he stood.

Well, he thought, at least the sex was fantastic.

After Perry rushed out of the apartment, five minutes later than he’d planned, and J.D. redressed and made his way back to the living room, he caught sight of _Ulysses._ Considering its new position--crammed under one of the left legs of the coffee table, presumably to keep it balanced--J.D. judged Perry may have noticed the book after all.

* * *

Around ten that night, Glenn Matthews woke up. It wasn’t the first time he’d opened his eyes, but it was the first time J.D. had been present. J.D. set aside the chart, going over his vitals before greeting him properly.

“Good evening, Mister Matthews.” He remembered, at the last second, not to lean against the counter as had become custom around the comatose man. “We haven’t had the chance to meet yet. I’m Doctor Dorian.”

“Where’s Blonde Doctor?” Glenn narrowed his eyes around the room, eventually settling on the door.

“Unfortunately, Doctor Reid had to go home for the next few hours.” J.D. picked up the chart behind him once again, if only to keep his hands busy. “She’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

“She tell you what’s wrong with me?”

Trying to explain to someone they had something as complicated as a brain tumor became vastly easier after spending over four years in makeshift medical tents. In America there were teams of doctors, good surgeons, clean hospitals. There was access to medicine and new advancements every day. Each factor adding up, more and more, to a chance at making it home.

A small chance, maybe, but it was always that: a chance.

“That doesn’t look so bad.” Glenn prodded at the small dot on the landscape of his brain.

“It’s about the size of a penny.” J.D. took the images away, folding them back between the pages of medicine and tests. “The part our team is focused on is where it’s located. What we’d like to do is--”

“Blonde Doctor told me you served.”

“Yessir, started in the 1st Medical Battalion in ‘65. Came back last year.” J.D. drummed his fingers against the folder in his hand. “And it’s, uh….Doctor Reid.”

“I know her name.” Glenn gave J.D.’s fingers a hard gaze until he stopped his tapping. “You think I’m an idiot?”

“No, sir. But with your condition, memory problems are a real concern, Mister Matthews.”

“My name is Glenn.” The man relaxed back on his pillows with a mocking grin.

“Glenn.”

Glenn settled his hands across his stomach. “In ‘Nam since ‘65, huh? That’s a long damn time, Doc.” J.D. nodded and, whether Glenn took pity on him or didn’t have anything else to add himself, he took a deep breath and continued in a different direction. “So what is it you want to do to me?”

J.D. paged Turk to the room as he walked Glenn through what he could. Regardless of rank or experience, Glenn’s expression morphed into the same slightly-dazed look that all patients got when J.D. started speaking beyond more common medical terminology, only coming back to himself when he heard the word ‘surgery’. Luckily, Turk arrived before he could raise any serious objections.

“This is Sergeant Christopher Turk, 15th Medical Battalion.” J.D. placed a hand on Turk’s shoulder as he rounded the bed to exit the room. “He’ll explain the rest to you. I’ll be back to check on you later.”  

He was three steps away from the nurse’s station when a hand at his elbow changed his direction. Between one step and the next he was making a left towards the Chief of Medicine’s office with Kelso at his side.

“Doctor Dorian, do you know why I had to take time out of my schedule to find you today?”

J.D. opened his mouth to respond.

“Don’t bother, I’ve already planned this conversation for maximum efficiency. If it lasts any longer than the time it takes for us to get to the cafeteria, I’ll be _crabby_.” Kelso turned a sharp left on his heel, and J.D. followed. “I don’t think I ask a lot of you, just enough so I know what’s going on. I don’t like being hands-on, understand?”

He seemed to be waiting for some sort of indicator, so J.D. nodded.

“Good. _Then hand in your evaluations_.” Kelso turned to face him at the entrance to the cafeteria, a group of nurses parting to move around him. “Or be prepared to deal with me breathing down your neck for the next month.”

“But, sir--”

Kelso’s smile was not at all inviting. “That’s all!”

“But I…,” J.D. called after him, wincing when another nurse bumped into his shoulder, “...have been handing them in.”

J.D. walked back to the nurse’s station, disoriented and, thanks to the smells wafting from the cafeteria, a little hungry.

“Paperwork goes missing around here all the time, Bambi.” Carla barely reacted when J.D. explained what happened. “Don’t leave it outside of his office next time. Hand it straight to him.”

“I have been. Or...shit.” J.D. dropped his head into his hands. Carla inched a hand between his, her gaze probing. “ _Perry_ has been. He offered to take mine for me.”

Carla’s eyebrows climbed, her lips drawing in as she looked to be fighting hard against the impulse to say whatever was on her mind. J.D. stared at the clock, realizing with a sinking feeling that there were eleven more hours on his shift. He picked up his stack of charts, repeating a louder, more emphatic, “ _Shit_.”

* * *

It was nine in the morning when J.D. finally made it through the door to his apartment.

“How the hell did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

Perry’s head popped around the door frame of his room. “Say what now, Dolly?”

“You put your name on my evaluations?” J.D. threw his jacket over the back of the couch. “I know you’re not lazy, so what were you doing?”

“Uh, no,” Perry stepped out of his room, tugging a shirt on as he walked. “I’m also not inclined to find another job. ”

“You’re not going to--,” J.D. shook his head and took a breath. Perry was rooting around in the closet for his own jacket, not paying any attention to him anyway. “You’re telling Kelso you got our forms confused.”

Perry pulled out his suede jacket with a triumphant flourish. He tugged one brown sleeve over an arm then the other, his smile static as he finally looked at J.D. “No, I’m not.”

J.D. leaned against the back of the couch. He could feel the keys in his coat pocket dig into his thigh. It’s not that he couldn’t guess at Perry’s reasoning. He was the one who had to take the trash out last Tuesday, filled to the top with empty liquor bottles. Under Ms. Burnette’s watchful eye, through her curtain slats, he’d felt like a criminal.

“Fine,” he said, because Perry had earned that much. “But you’re filling your own out this time.”

“ _No_ , I’m not,” Perry laughed, body slanted towards the door. “Don’t you understand, Newbie? If I fill those out with my answers, I wouldn’t be a doctor anymore.”

“Maybe you _shouldn’t_ be!”

“I did _just fine_ when bullets were flying at me--”

J.D. slammed his hands back against the wood of the couch, immediately feeling the ache in his palms but satisfied at the sound it made. “You almost died!”

Perry raised his arms, placating. “All right, calm down, Johnny.”

J.D. jerked away, knowing it was too violent a reaction by the way Perry threw his hands behind his head and pulled at the shorter strands there. They stood and stared, waiting for the other. J.D. broke first, as he most always did.

“ _Don’t_ call me that.” J.D. shoved past him, tempestuous panic stampeding up his sternum and clawing at his throat. By the time he slammed his way into his room his ears were buzzing, and through the noise, like the sound of a radio announcer over static, came Perry’s muted shout of ‘ _J_ _esus’_ and the slam of the front door.

J.D. cried himself into a black and fitful sleep.

Between inky spots of nothing, he dreamed of being a teenager, and fighting with his mother in perfect Vietnamese. He dreamed of throwing darts at a picture of his father stuck to the back of his door. Neither of them had faces, but he knew exactly who they were, and he understood everything that was said.

He woke up, eight hours later, and thought about Mister Matthews’ brain tumor. How funny the mind was. He had never fought with his mother or cared very deeply about his father. That had always been Dan.

He woke up hungry and with a heavy head. He could remember how mad he had been hours before, could poke at the dormant feeling like wrinkled lava. A raw nerve was somewhere underneath, he knew, but he wasn’t angry now. Just exhausted.

He found roast beef in the fridge. He didn’t bother with bread, just took the plastic tub back to the bathroom and turned the knob in the shower to heat the water. It wasn’t the most pathetic he’d looked since coming back, sitting on the toilet and eating roast beef. At least he was showering, he reasoned.

An hour later, the water was cold and J.D. felt slightly closer to human. He could make out the sounds of Perry the next room over and finally thanked his years of service for _something_. Before the war, a fight like the one they’d had would have shamed J.D. into staying in his room, but this J.D. had experienced embarrassment and discomfiture in fits and bursts alongside camaraderie he ignored or, more often, learned to laugh at. If he didn’t, he’d be too distracted to work on anyone. More likely he’d get himself shot, stress smoking or straying too far from the group.

Perry hadn't been there for every shameful thing J.D. had done, but he had seen enough and still said yes when he asked to move in. On some level, they both knew what they were signing up for.

Perry was sitting on J.D.’s bed, with a damn new newspaper he must have picked up from downstairs, slouched and casual, like he’d not been waiting at all.

“What was that movie you were talking to Baldy about?”

J.D. cast back in his mind to the last time the three of them were in a room together, and landed on a day two weeks ago in the cafeteria during a rare shared shift. Carla couldn’t watch movies at the theater anymore, Turk confessed over a freshly opened pudding. Too much noise, too little light. J.D. hadn’t tried but he didn’t mind the dark, and he and the television seemed to get along all right.

J.D. shook some of the water from his hair, digging a finger into his ear until he heard squeaking. “ _Scrooge_?”

“That’s the one.” Perry shook the paper out in his direction. J.D. caught a glimpse of the leisure page and, splashed across the back, the news. J.D.’s eyes tracked the slanted headline, _Berkeley council offers sanctuary to war critics_ and, to the right in smaller letters, _Cable TV compromise gains support_.

“Wanna see it?”

After Perry broke Ben’s camera, he’d never apologized, just complained for a solid few days about the cost of shipping from America to Vietnam without explaining to anyone why. Ben had a new camera a few weeks later and J.D. wondered, at the time, if he had even been surprised. Perry struggled his way to an apology like he was walking on a bed of leeches.

This, too, was possibly the closest J.D. would get to what he actually wanted to hear. Sorry I invaded your privacy, signed false documents, you know, _illegal_ stuff. _Wanna see a movie?_

J.D. plucked the paper from between the tips of Perry’s fingers, folding it to hide the news. It blurred at the places J.D.’s still-damp hands grasped it, and he pretended to examine the local showtimes while sneaking snapshot quick glances at the expression on Perry’s face, which remained carefully blank.

He loved the idea of waiting until Perry started to fidget, except he knew Perry wouldn’t move, wouldn’t blink, until J.D. gave him an answer.

J.D. tossed the paper onto the floor, thinking how ludicrously simple it was to appease him. “Sure.”

The Aztec Theatre was a five minute walk from their apartment, nestled between a small pawn shop on the corner and a separate, adult theatre called the Foxy. J.D. felt it wasn't a long enough distance for chitchat, especially with his nose crammed into his jacket.

So he was surprised when Perry spoke up beside him.

“I saw Matthews is going in for prep tomorrow.”

J.D. slowly snaked his chin out of the cocoon of warmth he’d created to respond. “Ah, yeah. That was Elliot's call actually.”

“Elliot, huh?”

“Yeah she lets me call her by her first name, cause I’m nice to her.” J.D. took a half-step closer to Perry, away from the curb, as a taxi screamed past them. “Jealous?”

“Oh yeah, you’re both breaking my heart.” He leaned against the counter to speak to the ticket vendor. “Two for the, uh, the Christmas one.”

“ _Scrooge_.”

“Yeah, what he said.” Perry half turned while the machines inside went to work. “I’m nice to her. Nice enough.” J.D. gave him a long look. “What, you don’t find her annoying?”

“Here are your tickets, sir.” A hand slid under the small, glass window and J.D. looked up to thank the young, freckled boy. A cherub, he thought. Some sort of angel sent to rescue J.D. from disagreements.

Perry waited until they were in line for snacks to speak again. “Your mom coming in next week?”

J.D. cursed inwardly. The ticket boy had been a demon or, if an angel, withholding whatever blessing he had to bestow.

“I haven’t asked her about it,” he said, words seamlessly blending into his order, “Popcorn, please, and…,”

“I’ll get my own stuff. Why not?”

J.D. watched through the slit in the metal tin as kernels transformed into small, fluffy morsels, smiling as they pooled at the bottom of the glass box. “I thought you were bad at small talk.”

“I’ll admit I don’t like it.”

J.D. took the paper bag ‘Tina’ handed across the counter to him, pressing it to his chest and grasping for a fistful of napkins with the other. “I do. I did,” he corrected, licking a sprinkling of buttery dust from the tip of his thumb.

“I remember,” Perry chuckled, a deep, honest sound that stilled whatever lingering anxiety reverberated through J.D.’s chest.  

From the vibrations of the first bombs hitting Camp Holloway, J.D. respected Sergeant Cox. He didn’t know when he started liking him, but he was sure that he owed a lot of it to Ben and the softening that came with his ever-present camaraderie. Whenever it was, at some point, probably around the time Sergeant Cox had become Perry, J.D. decided he liked him. He liked being under his care, he liked his tutelage, he liked his daring when push came to shove. He kept the memory of the first time Perry called him J.D. in a mental fort, because he liked being liked by him.

He especially liked this Perry, who could smile with his voice; hooked and reeled J.D. in until he smiled too, unthinking.

J.D. found a pair of seats for them in the near dark, close to the exit and on the end of the row. They weren’t what he would have chosen before, but this wasn’t _before_.

“So, your mom?”

“Huh? Oh, I don’t want her to tell me how well I’m doing.” J.D. settled his popcorn between his thighs. “That’s weird, I know. I just…,” He thought of his evaluations, his odd dreams, and how poorly he slept when Perry wasn’t home. “I don’t want her to fuss.”

Perry reached over, briefly covering the back of J.D.’s hand and tapping twice before pulling away.

When the movie started, it was easy for J.D. to pretend this was a weekly routine. They hadn’t invited Elliot and Jordan along, so even Perry would consider it a stretch in calling this anything other than a date. J.D. had little to compare the experience to, as he’d never brought anyone to the movies. Another _before_ he’d never know.

Midway through the second verse of “ _Christmas Children_ ”, Perry must have realized what he’d agreed to as he leaned over, unnecessarily close, and hissed, “You didn’t tell me this was a _musical_.”

Perry’s lips were positioned over the shell of J.D.’s ear, teeth scraping slightly against the helix, and it was all J.D. could do not to push back into his seat, away from the shivery frisson the touch caused, like the burst of a trip flare over elephant grass.  

“ _I Hate People_ ” seemed to raise Perry’s spirits, but by the time “ _Father Christmas_ ” rolled around, he’d run out of his own popcorn and was rooting around in J.D.’s bag, scavenging for the pieces he seemed to feel were ‘best’. It hardly mattered to J.D.. They were sharing their snack now, if not a drink (never that, a quiet internal voice that sounded like Perry chided. Alcoholic or no, never that). And his knee rested against Perry’s from where it knocked against his fifteen minutes into the film. And in the dark like this, he bet himself, if he tried…

Perry’s hand dove into the near-empty bag of popcorn and, as he dug around, J.D. stretched his fingers out; not the whole hand, just enough to twine their pinkies together. J.D.’s eyes were on the screen, but his mind was in Tây Ninh, following two tunnels that honeycombed to meet under the dirt, in the darkness.

Perry pulled his hand out of the bag, but he didn’t pull away.

The skeletal figure of Death wasn’t especially disturbing, but as Ebenezer tumbled into the passageway to Hell, fire lapping at his sides, J.D. felt Perry tense, his pinky snapping away as though it were a bone being set back into place. Ebenezer lay in the casket, cherry-red like the plastic tasting ice pops that appeared in stalls every summer. Indeed the rest of Hell seemed icy despite the flames, and the farther Ebenezer walked, the more taut the lines on Perry’s face became.

Eventually Perry stood, stiff-backed and gaze far away, to brush past J.D.’s knees towards the exit.

J.D. watched Ebenezer and Cratchit, stuck in an icy perdition of their own making for a few seconds more before following the same path Perry had taken. He knew how this story ended anyway.

J.D. found Perry leaning against the bricks of the Foxy; one hand, the hand whose pinky J.D. had been holding minutes before, was affixed to the wall like the anchor of a ship. J.D. could make out the light scarring across the back, was careful to bend low enough to let Perry see him before placing his hands on the other man’s elbows. Perry jumped violently under the joints of his fingers.

“Are you--”

“Don’t ask me that.” Perry’s gaze rose, two pinpricks of white that contracted and dilated with J.D. as their singular focus.

“It’s not a trick question.” J.D. carefully removed his hands. “I just want to know what happened in there. Avoid it happening again.”

“Last I checked, you were a goddamn doctor. You know what happened.” He stood, casting a furtive look around him and pulling his jacket in tighter by the lapels. After a shaky breath, he pointed sharply, accusing, at J.D.. “I don’t diagnose you, you don’t get to diagnose me. That’s the deal.”

J.D. recalled with sudden clarity, that bubbling angry feeling from earlier that day when they argued over _precisely that_. An unspoken deal, it seemed, that worked largely in Perry’s favor. J.D. thought about saying as much, but his eyes were stuck on Perry’s fingers still gripped tightly to his jacket.

_Intense,_ Turk’s voice cycled through his mind. _But not invulnerable._

“Let’s go home.”

J.D. knew something was still wrong when Perry took his drink to J.D.’s room. Perry had never fallen asleep there if he could help it, not even J.D.’s first night when J.D. realized that this apartment was no different than any other. That night, they’d grappled under the covers and lost the point halfway through, maybe realized what they were doing felt pointless, picked up the point again when the other one breathed.

After, J.D. followed Perry down the hall to his large room, somehow more stark than the rest of the house, and Perry hadn’t look surprised at all. Turned back the sheets, then rolled over like a silent command. _Shut the door. Get some sleep,_ like they were back in the officers barracks of Đông Hà.   

Tonight he was in J.D.’s room, sitting on his bed and finishing his drink like he planned to stay. J.D. went to wash up and, by the time he came back out, Perry had peeled his shirt off, his glass empty and his foot tap, tap, tapping against the carpet. J.D. was always gangly and a little paler than he’d like. In Vietnam, his skin had burned and peeled in fits and spurts. He’d learned to save his money for cream at the commissary. Perry had a well-defined chest that was more freckled than his face. J.D. hadn’t seen any spots since they’d been back, but he knew he hadn’t imagined them. Laying together under moored tarps the sun had broken through and seared Perry’s skin, made him red, then very light tan with more freckles than J.D. could count.

The moon cast a light across Perry’s shoulders and, there, just barely, J.D. could make out one, two, three...still more than he could count.

* * *

J.D. cared whether Perry liked him. He cared about keeping Perry’s respect. He cared about his friendship, and because of all of that J.D. entered Kelso’s office with a month’s worth of evaluations and a lie ready on his tongue.

He remembered Perry’s grip on his jacket and, later, in blue and white cotton sheets after a nightmare. J.D. cared about Perry, full stop, and because of _that_ , he opened his mouth and nothing came out.

He stood silent for long enough that Kelso finally asked, “What is it?”

“It’s about Doctor Cox, sir.”

When he got home that afternoon, a bag full of his stuff was in the hallway. A few pairs of underwear, two shirts, and a pair of pants, all crisply folded. Atop them was a stick of deodorant and, like a slap in the face, his banged up copy of _Ulysses_. He lifted the bag over his shoulder and hoped this didn’t mean that the rest of his things were destroyed.

There was no elevator on the third floor (just inconvenient enough, Perry had told J.D. when he moved in), and he considered the stairs down and out, into the street, past Ms. Burnette and her birds. Or up, to the elevator. Further up, and...

Jordan lived eighteen floors above them. J.D. had borrowed vanilla from her once. She had a loft, and a wall of books, and J.D. had learned what the words _home envy_ had meant while standing in her sitting room, waiting for her to retrieve the small bottle.

Now he stood outside her door, and she stood just inside, in a robe, and J.D. was pretty sure that was all. She looked him up and down, took a deep breath and motioned him in. Past the books, under the loft, and he had the erratic thought, _I sent this woman money_.

“Bob told me about the evaluations.” Jordan took the bag from J.D.’s shoulder and set it by the door. “Figured there was a fifty percent chance Per would kick you out. Thought for sure you’d go to the conjoined Turks.”

“They're trying to have a baby.”

“It’s gross how much you know about their personal life.”

“I care.”

“See where caring gets you, Wonderboy? Out on the streets.”

J.D. opened his mouth to argue that he had specifically _not_ turned to the streets, when a soft crash and a softer curse from the hallway interrupted him. Jordan stared behind her, face pinched.

“Is someone here? I can go.”

“What did I just say about caring a little less?” Whatever emotion had been on Jordan’s face a moment before resolved itself back to the bored acerbity that Jordan had managed to perfect. “And hang your jacket up, I'm not your mom.”

“Seriously, I can get a hotel. I came here because…,” His eyes drifted up to the loft where a few books were spread out, haphazard. Jordan had given him _Ulysses_ to read, “your book.”

“Keep it, I hate that book.” Jordan replied shortly, digging in a drawer for something. J.D. hesitated by the coat closet, hands on the sleeve of his jacket. Eventually Jordan stopped digging to stare at him. “I don’t like people popping in unannounced. But when family has a problem, you put on your big girl pants and help.”

The way she said it, so quickly, so confidently, took J.D. aback. He was family, he had a problem. He was _family_.

Huh.

“There you are.” She withdrew a carton of cigarettes, turning the box around and around until she found the expiration date, narrowing her eyes at the numbers. Seemingly satisfied, she motioned J.D. towards the balcony. He felt the steady stream of warmth at his back from the apartment and wished desperately that he hadn’t put his coat away. Looking to his left, he figured Jordan must be colder.

“Want to talk about it?”

J.D. leaned forward against the railing of the balcony, ignoring the chill against his forearms. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I have a few things.” Jordan lit up uselessly beside him until, on the third try, J.D. leaned over to shield the small flame from the wind. “Thanks. You know, Perry took me to prom in high school?”

“No kidding?” He tried picturing the two of them together. It was easier than picturing them in high school, or Perry in a tuxedo and Jordan in a fluffy dress.

“Ryan Spellman had just broken things off with me and I wanted to show him what he was missing. You know, high school stuff. Benji on my left arm, Perry on my right.” She tapped her cigarette beside his elbow.

“Were they…,” J.D. started, then pulled on the corners of his lips. He had questioned, before, how much Jordan knew about him. Now he wondered how much she knew about her own brother. The unasked question hatched between them like a baby bird, born on its own schedule, and Jordan plucked it from its nest.

“I think I had _something_ of a clue back then, about those two, but I was always too serious for them. Hated Perry’s drinking, and if he was mean, I had to be meaner. Benji always laughed it off; he was good at that. Everything was a joke.”

“I lost my appendix in ‘Nam,” J.D. interrupted, for just this, to say. “Ben asked me if I wanted a picture in memoriam. I was just glad he stayed in the tent.” He leaned back, railing creaking under his weight, eyebrows creasing under his memory. “Perry stayed too, yelled at me. Cause I had to stay awake the whole time you know?”

Jordan’s wrist settled near his again, face caught in a picture of appalling wistfulness.

“I actually liked Perry a little bit. I had to, I’ve known him since we were twelve. Then Benji followed him and…God, I could have killed him.” She sucked on her cigarette hard. “Both of them. Idiots.”

J.D. heard this part, already, without the context. He counted the bars on the rail, waited for another lick of warmth at his back.

“Anyway, me and Perry tried something again for a few months, when he got back. But it was all…,” She waved her hands in S-shaped patterns in front of her face. “He was trying to take care of me, because of Ben. Because he didn’t know how to take care of himself. Everything was going wrong with him and he couldn’t go ten minutes without telling me how to live my life. Look at you,” J.D. jumped at the sudden attention. “You’re the same way. That blood vessel in your head is ready to blow. What is it, want me to put the cigarette out?”

“It’s terrible for you.”

“I know.” She tapped the end of her cigarette, passing it over to J.D. “I would have warned you, you know?”

“About the meanness?” J.D. took the offering, stubbing it out for her. “I was under his command for years, Jordan. I knew about that.”

“About the drinking.”

J.D. stared at the wisp of smoke in front of his eyes. “I knew about that too.”

“I guess I thought...It doesn’t matter.” Jordan wrapped her hands around her elbows and shivered, like she’d just noticed the cold. California winters were nothing held against Ohio, but a low 40 was still 40. “Benji loved musicals too. Made Perry see _Oklahoma_ three times.”

J.D. didn’t know if it was meant to be comforting, or if Jordan was still reminiscing. The connective tissue between Ben and himself that usually left a spark of fondness, this time, felt bleak. He was reminded of Ebenezer’s hell; glacial and firey at once, and hollow.

“D.J.,” he felt a hand land on his shoulder, “there’s a bed in the loft. Get some sleep.”

“‘Course.” He patted her hand twice, a habit he knew immediately he’d picked up from Perry. From the sympathetic look she gave him, she knew it too. “Goodnight Jordan.”

He listened to her rummage through the kitchen and pour herself a drink. He could feel her eyes on his back for one minute...three minutes...five. Finally he heard a door close and he saw his next breath release in front of him, heavier than the last. He leaned forward on the railing again and stared down at Fifth and Elm. He could doze, standing, and his half-waking brain would pick out colors along the black river streets like fireworks on the ground. He could pretend this was base and the laughter down the hall was Hillbilly telling a dirty joke or, more alarmingly, this was patrol and the small noises in the next room were the VC. He could go inside and do something healthy; get a glass of water, go up to the loft distract himself with a book.

But he knew he wouldn’t sleep tonight.


	4. Chapter 4

_In the rather dark sitting-room of Boulders, Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd were having an argument about the shooting._

J.D.’s blurry gaze blinked into sharp focus on the last four words. Jordan was banging around in the kitchen and, shortly after, he could smell coffee filling the loft. Chapter nine ended on the next page; he closed the book and placed it on top of the others before making his way down the ladder. He was curious if Agatha Christie was more to Jordan’s taste.

It took him a few seconds longer than it should have to realize that the scantily clad woman in the kitchen was not Jordan. J.D. rubbed his right eye with the heel of his hand, just in case. When he opened his eyes again, she was still there.

“Elliot? Uh, hi.”

“Holy frick!”  J.D. remained frozen in the doorway as Elliot opened two cabinets to hide herself. “J.D.! What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

Elliot peeked behind the top door, blushing furiously. “Sorry,” she said, haltingly. “Jordan didn’t say you were spending the night…or that you were _here_.”

“Sorry,” he blinked. “Family problems.”

“J.D.?” she said and he nodded, still groggy. “Can I _please_ put some clothes on before we talk any more?”

“Oh! Yes, sorry!”

He averted his eyes as she passed, and moved into the kitchen to pour some coffee from the machine, spending most of the minutes warming his hands and blowing over the cup.

“So, Jordan let you spend the night?” J.D. asked when she returned in a sweater and khakis.

“You’re _living_ with Doctor Cox.” Elliot snapped immediately, accusing and defensive. J.D. took a long, hot gulp of his coffee, his eyes burning more than his throat.

J.D.’s eyes skittered over the counter to his bag, ragdolled beside the door in the same place Jordan had dropped it the night before. Elliot looked too. He took another sip of his coffee while she poured one of her own.

“I just meant I’m impressed she let you in.”

“...Thanks.” She sagged against the counter behind her, eyes jumping from J.D.’s bag to her cup like a bouncing Betty. “You and Jordan,” she said, an edge to her tone J.D. couldn’t place, “have a lot of family in common?”

“Not really,” J.D. tilted his head. “Perry kicked me out. She let me sleep in the loft.”

“Oh,” Elliot’s face fell, expression reforming into something sympathetic and warm. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” J.D. raised his cup to her, because Elliot had been kind since he met her and she sounded like she meant it.

“I’m just here for a few nights.” She cradled her cup to her chest, smile small and distracted. “Jordan’s... _really_ sweet, actually.”

J.D. stared straight ahead, finishing his coffee and ignoring the chant in his head, _Oh God, Elliot and Jordan, Oh God, Oh Go--_

“We should get to work.”

* * *

J.D. kept a careful distance from Mister Matthews as Turk briefed him on his upcoming surgery. His mind was still back with the tough-minded lady farmer and her perky companion on the pages of _A Murder is Announced_. His eyes ate at Perry's handwriting, shoved haphazard between Elliot's notes, wondering if he had read any of the books in that loft. If Jordan had had a television, once, and thrown it away, as J.D.'s mother had, because Perry spent hours on the couch staring at it and drinking before he wandered back to bed.

"Hey, J.D.," Turk stopped talking to tilt his chin towards the window beside the door. Perry was there, in a soft green sweater and denim jacket. Living with Perry, J.D. had grown used to seeing him in civilian garb, and he cataloged the tells of a bad night's sleep: unshaven with spots of red under Perry's eyes. The fact that he was here at all was...significant. J.D. wasn't sure what to do with any of this information; most of his brain was stuck, drifting lazily between the prescription labels and the cause of a murder on October 29th, at Little Paddocks.

"Need to borrow your doctor, Gigantor."

"Well he's useless in here," Glenn settled back into the pillows, more at ease subjected to teasing than a medical lecture. "Haven't heard a peep out of him all morning."

"That's a trick you'll have to teach me." His eyes slid to J.D. and he motioned towards the door with his thumb. "Newbie?"

Militant professionalism from years of literal drills, and respect for Glenn's condition, kept J.D. from responding the way he wanted to. He felt the skin around his eyes tighten as he slammed the clipboard on the closest counter and followed Perry from the room.

 _One moment, Mister Matthews_ , he heard Turk say as he passed. J.D. waited just outside, watching Perry continue on down the hall as Turk came to stand beside him.

"You gonna tell me what happened? And don't say nothing," Turk spoke over the start of J.D.'s sentence. "You look like shit."

J.D. heard a crack as he loosened his jaw. "I told Kelso about the evaluations."

"Good for you, man." Turk nodded, mouth pinched as he seemed to consider his next words. "You tell him you lied on yours?" J.D. stared at Turk, unsure of what his expression gave away. After a moment, Turk smiled, an insignificant, familiar thing that made J.D. want to curl up under the nearest desk and cry. "It's cool, I just know you. I think Carla might have too. Never lets me see hers, says they're supposed to be private."

"Yeah...," J.D. coughed into his elbow to hide his face. Turk placed a hand between his shoulder blades.

"Come to dinner tonight," Turk pulled away, moving back towards Mr. Matthews' room. "I'll make steak."

J.D. followed Perry's path toward the break room remembering the worst reprimanding he'd ever received from the Sergeant. Ben's death was fresh, unprocessed enough that J.D. could swear most nights he still heard him just around the corner of a door. J.D. volunteered to follow every patrol he could, knowing the feel of Ben's arms in his hands waited behind his eyelids if he slept.

By the third week, Perry took him aside and upbraided him until exhaustion finally made J.D. weak at the knees. Perry held him up by the elbow, practically throwing him on a cot. In the splintered way J.D.'s memories worked now, the image of Perry crying over Ben, cradled in J.D.'s vise-like grip, blurred together.

He slapped the side of the break room door. Perry wasn't crying now, and J.D. could smell whiskey.

"Are you drunk?"

Perry placed a palm to his temple, using his other arm to search out the nearest bed. "I'm hungover, which is...more unwelcome."

"Whoever smells you isn't going to care."

"I'm off the clock. Let 'em." Perry dropped his hand to the bed. "Carla says you didn't go to hers last night."

"I didn't." J.D. closed the door behind him and crossed his arms.

"So," Perry balanced his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands together. He looked, if J.D. had to pick a word, nervous. "Where'd you go?"

"You kicked me out of our apartment, I went to _none of_ at the corner of _your business_ ," J.D. said, finally letting some of his anger slip through, though so effectively tinged with exhaustion it wouldn't have landed with anyone who didn't know him.

"I was trying to find you this morning to...," The muscles around Perry's jaw clenched. "You know, if you wanted to come back. I should have just...wasn't thinking straight after Kelso called, that's all." He rallied himself, sitting up straighter. "And you have a key, you should've just come back inside, told me to fuck myself."

"Fuck yourself." J.D. dropped his arms to his side, a little satisfied. If Perry was trying to apologize, it seemed to be causing him physical pain to do so. "Check Jordan's next time."

Perry released a breath, his nod barely perceptible. Silence fell over the room, broken by the sounds of footsteps and machinery in the hall. The heating unit sputtered to life above them, loud and comforting. Perry's gaze lingered on the ceiling before dropping to J.D.. It took J.D. an embarrassingly long time to realize what he was waiting for; a similar, no, a _better_ apology.

“I had to do it, Perry,” J.D. said. “You were a wreck.”

" _I’m_ a wreck? How much sleep did you get last night?" Perry pushed himself off the bed, hinges creaking under his weight. "Scratch that, I have the answer: _zilch_. What do you think it's been like living with you? The sleepwalking, and the nightmares, and the screaming?"

"...I don't have nightmares." J.D. sounded helpless to his own ears.

"You think I need help? Jesus," his laugh made J.D.'s stomach tighten. "Let me tell you something, kid. I've been watching over you for five years now and they'll need a hacksaw for that psyche."

 _This doesn't hurt,_ J.D.'s foggy thoughts were buffeted between Perry's words. _This isn't a bullet or shrapnel, this is just a feeling, an expression on a face. This doesn't hurt and it will pass._

"If there's something wrong with me," J.D. managed, slowly, licking lips that were suddenly too dry, "Kelso will see it in my evaluations."

"Oh ho ho," Perry's smile was bright and shark-like. "Yeah, your evaluations. Your mother might've been nice enough to let you lie, but not me, kid. See I'm a doctor and when I notice something wrong, even with as _messed up_ as I am right now, it's not in my nature to hide it."

"Like Ben?"

J.D. said it as quietly as he could, but the words were a bomb dropped in the middle of a battlefield--both sides were going to come out of the conflict savaged.

"What did you say?"

"I said, Ben was honest." J.D. challenged, feeling brave. "I thought you hated that. It just wasn't the kind of honesty you agreed with, I guess."

Perry looked like he might punch him, and J.D. couldn't blame him. He knew it had been a low blow. A beep from J.D.'s pager drew his attention down.

"Shouldn't you be sleeping one off?" He pulled the box on his hip to eye level and read the message. Thank god for cardiac arrest.

Perry deflated beside him. "That's not what I meant to say. About your...," He trailed off, motioning to his temple.

"I know it's not." J.D. hooked his pager to his scrubs. "You think I meant to say what I did about Ben?" Perry's face pinched towards the middle, the only outward sign the name had affected him. "That I meant to say _anything_ about Ben?"

"J.D.," the use of his name, stopped J.D.'s hand on the doorknob. "I know I need help, I _know_. I'm telling you, you do too."

"I need to help this patient." J.D. said on a quick, indrawn breath. "Go home Perry."

"Yeah," Perry nodded. "Yeah."

* * *

Carla's stare was aimed with hard precision at J.D. through their meal, and she barely spoke. J.D. offered to carry the dishes to the sink, just to escape, but he could feel the prick along his back and, when he passed her on the way to the kitchen, it seemed to intensify.

"I forgot to get the mail." Turk punched J.D.'s shoulder on the way to the coat closet. "Be right back." Lowering his voice he added, "Don't kill each other."

Carla took up the space in front of the sink, filling it with warm water. J.D. approached her with the same wary caution he would an open field. "Carla?"

"What is it, Bambi?"

"Is everything okay?"

She dropped the first of the plates into the sink and turned around, gaze less steely now that he saw her up close. It was fear, he realized. The same care he'd seen the day he'd boarded the plane for, what would be to her, his last trip home. The look she shot at Turk every time she thought he wasn't looking. J.D. reached out to take the cloth from her.

"Why don't you let me?"

Carla held tight to the cloth for a moment more then, with a slow breath, J.D. watched her grip loosen and release the red and white fabric. She moved, her back to the fridge, and slid to the floor, arms crossed over her knees, and J.D. did his best to focus on the dishes.

"Did you want to talk?" J.D. asked when it seemed Turk was giving them the space to do so.

"These medical evaluations...," she took a steadying breath. "I don't think it's right, do you? Not when someone doesn't want to talk about it."

J.D. picked up a smaller bowl, wiping absentmindedly. He wanted to ask, _What if they need to?_ But it felt hypocritical and pointed all at once. He wanted to know if she meant herself, or Perry...or if she was talking about him.

"Do you sometimes think of yourself like two people now?" She twisted her hands together between her knees. "Like the things you would have done, or part of you wants to do, and _oh gosh,_ you can feel that old part of you just rising up...then something pops. Like little campfire sparks--"

"Like a bone."

"Like a bone," Carla chuckled and nodded. J.D. nodded with her. "And then there's that _new_ you talking. When Perry came here this morning, I could _feel_ myself thinking, _Carla, you want to punch him_. But I just...hugged him."

J.D. set the bowl aside to dry and picked up a plate with a smile. At her center, Carla's battles had always been fought with benevolence.

"I used to talk more." He paused, eyebrows drawn together. "About...nothing, really."

"I remember," she wrapped a hand around his ankle, staring up at him until he started washing again. "You still do, sometimes, with Turk." She chewed her thumbnail for a moment, drawing into herself. "Perry came and I thought you could have been anywhere, hurt, because you didn't come here. I didn't go look for you and I didn't tell Turk. Why didn't I tell Turk?"

J.D.'s hand stilled on the plate. "I suppose you know the worst that could happen in a night. And that's still nothing compared to," he swallowed. "What we went through."

"Isn't it? J.D., I'm this new, pathetic... _scared_ person," Carla's hand tightened around his ankle. "If I'm not okay, I need you to be okay."

"I'm okay," he said, feeling listless, grounded only by the hand above his foot like a care package billowing to earth. "Carla," he drew her attention up once more. "What would you write, if you could be honest?"

Carla's lip quivered dangerously and opened her mouth to speak, the tips of her fingers flying to cover her eyes, head shaking too fast. J.D. abandoned the cloth in his hands and he dropped to the floor to curl up next to her. He didn't know what to say, and if he ever found the words he wasn't sure he'd be able to form them, so he just wrapped an arm around her and focused on the hum of the refrigerator until Turk returned, nose shiny from the cold and absent of any mail. His stare covered both of them and was lanced through with concern as he made his way from the foyer to the kitchen.

"I'm going to make hot chocolate," he turned from the cabinets with a mug in each hand. "Who wants hot chocolate?"

"Hot chocolate from my hot Chocolate Bear, yes, please," J.D. made grabbing motions with his free hand gleefully.

"Told you," Carla stifled a chuckle in J.D.'s shoulder.

"No, _I_ told you." He gave Carla a small, consolatory shake. "We're okay."

He gave them Jordan's number on the way out of the house that night, unsure where he'd end up by the night's close. It was difficult to say no to the warm guest bedroom they offered, but as comforting as the thought was, he had business to settle.

J.D. caught Elliot struggling to fit a box half her size through the side door of the apartment complex. He gently set the leftovers Carla had given him near the dozing homeless man that had taken up residence on the ground between their apartment and the next, and moved to help maneuver the unwieldy thing the rest of the way through.

"Thanks, J.D.."

"What the hell is it?" He said, staring at the elevator doors with a feeling approaching dread.

"A television," Elliot beamed, hands already gripping at the sides. J.D. bent at the knees to hold the other corners. "Jordan said she didn't care."

"She said she didn't care so," he hefted it up with a grunt, "you bought her a television?"

"Too much?"

"Little bit," he said. “What happened to a few nights?”

He would have called her silence suspicious, were there anything suspicious about it.

Navigating the elevators were easier, but it still took them an hour to get it into Jordan's apartment and set up across from the couch. By unspoken, mutual agreement, they both fell onto it, exhausted.

"Where the heck is Jordan?" J.D. looked at the clock, going on eight thirty now.

"Board meeting." Elliot groped around on the side table. She came back with her glass of water, left sitting for half an hour, and the remote. "Shall we?"

J.D. waved her on. She flipped through channel after channel and, after some time, landed on the news, which he should have guessed. They were speaking about homosexuals, which he wouldn't have bet on at all.

_The GAA has applauded the actions of the so-called Lavender Menace, a small, but vocal, group of lesbian radical feminists who gained prominence earlier this year. Arthur Bell has this to say:_

_\--will say it again; Your anger is necessary. Focus it on the heterosexual oppressors. Once you have developed a sense of class-consciousness, you will realize that assimilation into the heterosexual mainstream is no answer. Gays must unite among themselves, organize their common resources for collective action, and resist._

Both newscasters turned to one another with matching looks that said the same thing, 'We are the heterosexual oppressors. Let's hope they don't resist _too_ much.' Then, they smiled, like melting plastic reforming its shape.

_The GAA, that's the, uh, Gay Activists Alliance. Have you heard what the Times called them?_

_I haven't, no--_

_The Gay Goons._

_Oh, Lord!_

The laughter peeled away as Elliot changed the station with enough force for J.D. to hear her finger smash the button. They were pushing small tanks and dolls around a map that J.D. recognized at once. It still surprised him, somehow, to hear a man that must have been only a little older than he, talking about the war like it was something intangible.

_Operation Ivory Coast continues with Manor issuing the formal launch order--_

"Turn it off," J.D. said, sharply enough that it must have startled her, the remote nearly slipping from her hand in her haste to comply.

"Sorry," she muttered, chin tucked to her chest.

"No," he shook his head. "I don't live here."

"Neither do I," she shrugged, fiddled with the brick of plastic in her hands. "Do you ever feel guilty?"

 _All the time,_ he bit his lip to keep from replying. He took a breath and said, "About what?"

"The...homosexual thing. Not being out there, helping the cause?"

J.D. kept his gaze fixed on the frame of the television, suppressing his smile while Elliot fidgeted beside him.

"Oh, oh _my god_ ," she covered her mouth. "I'm so sorry, I just thought--"

"Relax, Elliot," he snorted. "I've slept with men."

She lowered one hand to slap his shoulder. He recoiled, laughing. "I don't know if that's anything I should relax about," she said, obviously sulking.

"Means you're in good company." He lifted a shoulder.

"I've...only slept with Jordan."

"Starting on a high note." He brought the grey ottoman closer to rest his feet on it. "My first was my girlfriend Julie, six months before I shipped out in '65."

Elliot pulled her knees up to the couch. "Did you guys....write?"

Julie Quinn had been Jules in J.D.'s book, but there were other, fonder things he had called her. None in letters, though.

"She was engaged before I left. And I think the whole 'cruising around gay bars' thing may have been a turn off for her." Elliot made an expression of slow understanding. "So, no, we didn't write. She was always nice to me, though."

Elliot shook her head, moving from the couch and balancing her water carefully. "Sorry, what were we talking about?"

"You were asking me if I felt guilty for not doing enough."

"I don't think I said _that_." Her laugh was charged with tension. “I just thought, hey, I’m protesting a war over in some country I’ve never been to, when people are being hurt _right here_.”

“You can’t fight everyone.” _Run_ , he thought. _Run faster_. _As fast as you can_.

“Not everyone. Just people trying to kill us.”

“You’re a blonde doctor from Connecticut, Elliot, no one’s trying to kill you.” J.D. leaned back spreading his arms across the couch.

“You weren’t here during Stonewall.”

“Nope. I was in a war over in some country you’ve never been to. Were _you_ at Stonewall?” He challenged, only to watch her startle. "I already fought one war. I don’t recommend it.”

"I didn't mean--," she cut herself off with a sharp breath and a quick shake of her head. "I worry a lot. I'm sorry I upset you."

"I'm not upset," he caught himself mid-chuckle, realizing how ridiculous that sounded. But Elliot didn't contradict him, and he crossed his arms, tapping his foot in an uneven beat. "The truth is when you start talking about that stuff I get...,"

"Scared?" She tried after his quiet drew out too long for her.

"No," his response was prepared, automatic and fired like a single discharge. _Beaten, cornered, weak, terrified._ A new word came to him with each tap of his foot. "Worried, like you, I guess."

“I wish I could sound as calm as you when you’re," she narrowed her eyes and turned to the sink to pour out her glass of water. "Worried. Or like Doctor Cox when he's mad. A little scary, but it’s a neat trick. Guess you learned it spending so much time with him."

He nodded, even though not a word of it was true. He never wanted to take that part of Sergeant Cox's personality, that calm cold that seemed to wash over him when he got _really_ mad. J.D. had learned it, not by watching the other man as she, and many others at the hospital assumed, but over the course of six months in a prisoner of war camp in South Vietnam.

A prickly blistering broke out across the palms of J.D.'s hands. His feet _itched_.

"Is that why you and he...," Elliot was suddenly much closer, and very loud against the soft buzz in J.D.'s ears. "No offense, but he's kind of _mean_. Must be something you get used to. Even Jordan still seems to," she considered her words with pursed lips, "care about him."

"Jordan cares about a lot of people," J.D. said absently, the chatter in his head fading to a faint clicking. He thought about Jordan, chasing him down in a parking lot to give him a home. He thought about Perry, the first words the man said to him as he dragged him away from a line of sympathetic medics; the protective fury of the safe keeper. "So does Perry."

Elliot walked the few steps to the door to lift J.D.'s bag in one hand, as though it spoke for her.

"I said he cared, I never said he wasn't mean."

"I never imagined that being something I'd want in a relationship. Takes all sorts, though." Elliot leaned against the loft stairs. "I mean, do you _want_ that?"

"I don't know."

 _I don’t know his favorite book,_ he thought. _I didn’t know he had a sister. I didn’t know he went to prom with Jordan and knew Ben since they were kids._

“I don’t even know...why he still wants me around.”

Whatever Elliot was going to respond with was interrupted by the sound of the door swinging open and a frustrated series of curses.

"Elevator crapped out on the fifth floor, because that's just the day I'm having." Jordan kicked the door shut, waving with her keys. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” J.D. said at the same time as Elliot’s, “I bought you a television.”

"Well," Jordan's tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth. "Thanks for that. I'm going to change. D.J., move your shit to the loft if you're spending the night again."

J.D. shot her a thumbs up over the arm of the couch as she made her way to the hall. The clack of her heels disappeared behind a closed door, and the silence between Elliot and he stretched. J.D. rose from his seat to move his bag when Elliot finally spoke.

"I think you should talk to him."

"Elliot--"

"J.D., you can be a little judgy, and yes I know that's coming from me. But it's what makes you honest, and supportive, and thoughtful. With your patients, with me, and I know you wouldn't make an exception for someone you really care about."  

"Jesus, Elliot, are you proposing?" J.D. set his bag the bottom of the loft stairs with a thump."I'm pretty sure you just wrote me _vows_."

She ignored his deflection. "I might not get along with Doctor Cox very well, but I know he sees all of that in you too because you're the only other doctor in that hospital he listens to. And you're never going to feel good until you hear _him_ say that. So, I think it'll be a whole lot easier on you if you just,” she shook her head, shoulders raised in an uncomfortable posture. “Just talk to him.”

J.D. recalled driving Jordan home from the restaurant the first time he'd met her. She'd lived in a different apartment then, farther from the hospital, so when he finally saw Perry it was going on midnight and he only managed it by way of rank and an understanding nurse. It took everything in J.D.'s considerable willpower not to go digging for a medical chart to see what they were doing for the burns down the bridge of his nose and around his lips. Despite how Perry's beard had grown out, he could make out the healed over blistering under his chin and close to his ears. J.D. had never paid much attention to Perry's ears, and whatever self-control he had left was broken by that insignificant thought.

J.D. pulled a chair close to the bed and laid a hand on Perry's knee as light as he could. Two days later and he'd be back on a plane to Cincinnati. A month after that, he'd be in Vietnam, and the thought made him curl in on himself over the side of Perry's bed.

He started at the feel of fingers at the base of his head as Perry rested a hand there.

"Sorry," J.D. sat up, dislodging the hand and immediately wishing he hadn't. "Thought you were sleeping."

Perry didn't say anything, and continued to do the same for all the hours he visited. Nor for Jordan, or the doctors. But two years later, he covered J.D.'s hand with his own and say, _I'm not dead, kid._ and J.D. would say, _I found you. I wish I could have stayed._

J.D. ran a hand through his hair, fingers curling around the base of his neck. "Okay."

* * *

Perry was in the shower when J.D. unlocked the door to the apartment. The few trinkets he had strewn across the room, after he'd complained about how empty the place felt once were still there, so evidently Perry had left his things intact. J.D. considered, again, how little he actually had. A picture that Carla had taken of Turk and himself somewhere in Bangkok, a red blanket his grandmother had given him when he was fifteen, and a handful of candles he had purchased on a whim when he found out he'd be moving in. A small, leather phone book was shoved under the table, where his copy of _Ulysses_ used to be.

"Hey," Perry took a half-step out of his room, almost shuffling in place before continuing on past the living room. J.D. felt the tamped down joke he would have made before, the _Honey, I'm home_ , and thought of Carla's words. The new him clawing out pieces of the old. "It's pretty late."

"Sorry," J.D. met him by the bar in the kitchen. "Elliot needed help bringing a television upstairs."

"Christ, how many of us live here?" Perry said under his breath, and J.D. feigned ignorance. "Guess you don't want a drink."

"Guessed right."

Perry stood at the bar, contemplating the bottle of Old Crow. He grabbed the neck and poured half of what J.D. would consider his 'normal' amount. "You staying?"

There existed a moment of symmetry in the question. From the first night J.D. moved in, telling Perry he could stay, to now, being asked to stay. Both were inexorably bad ideas. J.D. moved around the bar, eyes pinned to the small hole forming in his grandmother's blanket.

"Perry, did you know I cared about you when I moved in with you?"

Perry leaned against the bar, moving his wrist enough to make the ice in his drink click against one another. He looked, otherwise, unfazed.

"I meant to say, _I love you_."

"I understood what you meant, I'm just thinking." He threw his drink down his throat and winced. "So you don’t anymore, is what I’m hearing."

"No," J.D. nodded, contradicting, and not sure even he knew where he wanted this conversation to go. "No, I do."

"Kid," Perry dropped his forehead to rest on the edge of his glass. "J.D., whoever it is you thought you...had some sort of emotion toward? He's dead. He died in a trench in Con Thien."

"That's not true." He said, stubbornly refusing to point out that Carla had said something similar earlier that day.

"It's not?" Perry lifted his head, exaggerated confusion writ across his expression. “Please, Dolly, enlighten me.”

"What would have been the point? Why'd you come back here, buy a house, find your friends if you died?" J.D. motioned around the room. "We came home because we lived."

Perry stood up, glass cracking so hard against the counter J.D. was afraid, for a moment, it might break.

"And what did you think was going to happen when we did? Our grand homecoming," he said. "You think we were going to be happy?”

“Could Ben have made you happy?”

“Oh, what the hell, J.D.," Perry laughed, bitter and stinging, reaching for his glass and seeming vexed to find it empty. “Yeah. It wouldn’t have been a question with Ben. Jealous?”

“Of what? That I get to have you? That I’m the one that made it out? Jealous of what, Perry?"

"You just don’t understand, kid. Every time I kiss you I remember...," he took shallow breaths through his nose, glass tapping against the bar, and with each tap J.D. felt a familiar displeasure, and a humming at the back of his throat, worming its way to his ears. "Ben was--"

"I don't understand?" J.D. could hear his breath hitching between words. His palms burned. "Don’t talk to me like I wasn’t there."

He didn't remember walking to the couch, but Perry stopped his pacing in front of it with a gentle touch to his shoulder.

"J.D., kid, look at me," he said, and J.D. did. "You’re here, you’re okay. I’m sorry."

"Think I'll have that drink now." J.D. said, and made a quick turn to the couch while Perry poured him his own glass. When he returned, J.D. sat hard, drink sloshing around and spilling onto his hand. Perry sat on the coffee table, once balanced by _Ulysses_ and now by so many names, J.D. thought coming down from his giddy, angry high.

"I knew you cared about me, of course I did," Perry swiped at his nose, rested his elbows on his knees; anything to keep from raising his eyes. "You _care_ , J.D., too much. You always have. I remember what that kind of caring did to me and...I knew it'd get you hurt."

"I only came down here...," J.D. said, feeling tendrils of himself reconnecting, snapping back into place, his hands cool around the glass. "I wanted to figure out how you feel about me. I don't know why I didn't think about the rest of it."

"How I feel?" Perry's confusion seemed genuine this time. "You're the Fucking New Guy who I swore I'd get kicked out of my command. You're Specialist Dorian, who saved more men than I can count. You're the kid even Ben wanted to look out for, and god knows how I stood the two of you together without shooting myself in the foot because you were the most goddamn annoying--," He covered his face with what might have been a laugh or a choked cry, J.D. was too afraid to reach out and check. When he pulled his hand away, his face was dry. "You're _J.D_.. I feel...I don't know, what do you want me to say?"

"Do you love me?"

He looked wrung out, dragging a hand through his hair. "Of course I love you," he said, and J.D. should have been happy. He should have leaned forward to kiss him, to keep him from saying anything else. But the rising unease at Perry's tone kept J.D. from moving at all.

"I loved you in Vietnam, I loved you when I thought you were dead, I loved you when you came back." Perry continued. "But you said it yourself. We made it out, Ben didn’t. Does that sit right with you?"

J.D. thought about Dan. Dan, who needn't have been in Vietnam. Who he'd asked, practically _begged_.

“No,” he brought his drink to his lips with shaking hands, finishing it in two large gulps. “But I didn’t kill him.”

“You let me know the day that makes you feel better.”

A laugh bubbled out of J.D., unbidden and broken.

"When I said you don't understand," Perry made an aborted attempt to reach out a hand, fingers clenching into a fist and resting on his thigh. "I know you cared about Ben, and that...God, I can't tell you what I think about that. I don't have the words for it. But I look at Jordan or I kiss you, and I remember--," he bit off his words. "It's not a choice I have, remembering. But I have a choice with you. Not hurting you."

"You had a choice when I asked you if I could move in too." J.D. pointed out. "What did _you_ think was going to happen?"

"I thought you'd get tired of me a lot quicker, that's for damn sure." It was the sort of joke that was told with the suggestion of truth, J.D. could tell, and when it didn't land Perry sighed and continued. "Or you'd do something to piss me off enough to show my ass. Jordan can tell you I'm not good at living with people."

"She may have mentioned."

"Either way, I knew it was the best way to keep an eye on you." He moved to settle on the couch beside J.D.. "Guess I owe Jordan again."

"I think she was hoping I would be able to keep an eye on _you_."

A flicker of a smile crossed Perry's face.

"So what now?"

"Now?" Perry stretched his arms out, burying his fingers in his hair. "Apartment's yours for a little while, if you want it. I'm going to call Paige, let her know I'm coming up a little early. Tell Kelso I need some leave."

"It's not the worst idea you've had." J.D. said and motioned between them. "But I meant more...,"

"I'm going to my sister's, not rehab. You don't think I've changed enough for you to...fine. But when I come back, I'll still be the same person you're talking to, right now." He placed a hand on his chest. "And that person doesn't have the kind of faith in people that you do, J.D.. Hell, everything I've told you and you're still thinking about an _us_. There's not an us now."

"And all that telling me you love me, and you don’t want to hurt me was you trying to say there shouldn't be?"

"That was me saying that there won't be."

J.D. looked at the ceiling and hoped it would make more sense. He loved Perry, Perry loved him. Past experience suggested this was the part where where things got easier.

Then he remembered the gap. What he wanted and what Perry wanted, brushing up against one another; the same and repelled. J.D. thought about the times he and Dan would hold the refrigerator magnets up to one another and push as hard as they could to no effect. J.D.'s heart didn't stop or break, but for the first time since he'd met Perry, the man felt just out of his reach.

“Okay,” he said, tired and tipsy. The closing strands of _Close to You_ by The Carpenters were filtering in from the apartment next to theirs. “...okay."

J.D. stood and Perry rubbed a hand across his mouth. "Are you going back to Jordan's?"

"I'll sleep just as fine there as I will in my room."

Perry grabbed his wrist. "Then why not stay? I'm not kicking you out again, I'm just--"

"Letting me know how you feel," J.D. nodded, covering Perry's hand with his own. "You know I can't stay here."  

"No, I know," Perry's fingernails dug in slightly between the tendons of J.D.'s wrist. "Of course."

"Perry, I need you to let go."

He could feel the tug on his arm before Perry leaned up to kiss him, but it was the execution of the thing which caught him off guard; soft and light.

Their kisses, up til now, had always been combustive, like coal, nothing chaste and slow like this, barely touching. Any other kiss J.D. could have walked away from, would have found excusable, but not this. Not this lover's kiss, exactly the thing J.D. wanted months ago and was hoping to avoid now.

And suddenly his fatigue was replaced with fury, and the first kiss he returned to Perry was fueled almost solely by that, hands wrapped around the sides of the other man's face and gripping with helpless urgency.

 _You don't get to do that,_ he tried to say with teeth and lips and tongue. _You don't get to tell me you love me, and tell me this won't be anything, then kiss me like that._

J.D. said none of this out loud, for fear that Perry might stop kissing him at all.

He felt Perry's hands grip his lower back moments before he was dragged to Perry's lap and tossed backwards onto the couch. J.D. propped up on his elbows, kissing Perry again and pressing his tongue against the small divot above his lip where the blistering never fully healed. Perry shuddered above him, and J.D. canted to his left side to run a hand through the coarse hairs under his chin and the web of scarring there.

The part of him that wanted to stay angry, to take his pain and throw it back into the act, had dimmed to a small, burning ember in the pit of his stomach. The rest of him was dangerous hopelessness, unable to bear the thought of never doing this again, pitching himself forward harder when Perry's hand made its way down, fingers flexing against solid flesh.

J.D. groaned a decisive _Yes_ , laying the word in the crook of Perry’s neck, and Perry buried his other hand in J.D.'s hair, holding him there; a spectacularly familiar feeling.

Perry's freckles stood out, this close, and these were what J.D. chose to focus on when they pulled apart just enough to shed their clothes. And how black Perry's very blue eyes looked when they crashed back together. How his hair was growing too long on the sides, when J.D.'s hands found purchase there again.

After, J.D. laid in the circle of Perry's arms. He didn't want to turn back and invite more conversation, or see what anxious disquiet would be reflected back at him on Perry's face. He let Perry drape a cautious arm over his side and, after less than a moment's thought, grasped the tips of his fingers between his own.

Then, perhaps thanks to the sex or as a consequence of his lack of sleep the previous night, J.D. closed his eyes and slipped into an uneasy rest.

Perry sat up and stepped over him at six, pulling his grandmother's blanket from the back of the couch and tucking the corners in before standing and stretching out. The couch had been a bad idea, J.D. thought, still in a state of half-sleep. He drifted in and out until an hour before his own shift, waking with the same malaise that followed a night of heavy drinking or crying, neither of which had happened. He stared down at his hands, slightly shaking on the red and orange patterns of the blanket resting over his lap, quietly realizing he had no idea what the right thing to do was.

So he went to work.


	5. Chapter 5

Elliot's tray landed in front of J.D. before she spoke, giving him time to sit up and pretend he was at least half-awake. "Did you talk to Doctor Cox last night?"

J.D. ignored her, focusing his attention on Jordan, who seemed caught up in the task of punching a hole in a juice box. "This is who you've been visiting? That explains a lot."

"Well?" Elliot's voice achieved that nasal, high-pitched quality that would have never played well as a soldier, but worked excellently on the patients. "Did he say anything?"

Jordan sat across from J.D., victorious over her juice, and Elliot followed suit. "Probably not the best place," she said.

"He said some things, I said some things," J.D. moved the salisbury steak around on his plate with the tines of his fork. "He's visiting his sister for the holidays. The apartment's all mine but, uh, when my mom’s not there do you mind if I...?"

Jordan's expression wavered. He was never sure how much she understood, but his general impression was, _More than you think_. "Sure kid." She waved her juice at him, seemingly dismissive. He appreciated the false cavalier attitude with which she presented her gratuities. Then, he wasn't sure she'd be able to stand it otherwise. "Stay for Christmas, the more the merrier."

Elliot took Jordan's words to heart, keeping the rest of their conversation to holiday plans and hospital talk. When J.D. left to drop off his tray, Jordan grabbed his wrist as he passed her, squeezing lightly.

He took the long way to Mister Matthews’ room, stopping to check in on other patients. Turk and the hospitals team of surgeons had made a decent first pass at Glenn's tumor, but the recovery was going to be long and the man was going to spend most of the next few weeks sleeping.

Turk exited the room as J.D. approached. “Everything looking good?” He looked around Turk's shoulder and, sure enough, Glenn was asleep, inhaling in soft, short gasps.

“Vitals are still stable.” Turk half-turned to look as well. “Wen's worried about blood pressure.”

“I'll put in an order to bump up his chlorothiazide.”

“Thanks.” A smile broke across Turk's face and he took a step forward to wrap an arm around J.D.’s shoulders, dragging him past the nurses’ station and towards the stairs.

“No worries, you know I always listen to your advice,” J.D. said, stiffening when Turk made a considering noise beside him. “What?”

“Just thinking of all the times recently when you haven't,” Turk said when they reached the door to the roof, removing his arm to press the steel bar.

It was fair, J.D. thought, shielding himself against the wind and sudden burst of light. “How's Carla?”

Turk turned to face the door, hands resting loose against his side, thumbs tapping against his hips. "She told me she wants to talk to someone. How are _you_?"

"Peachy," he said and Turk stared at him, incredulous. "All right, closer to peach syrup."

It felt like it should have taken longer to explain the events of the previous night, but most of what J.D. told Turk could be summed up in sweeping generalities, littered with rationalizations and a tinge of self-justification. Turk knew Perry, and he knew J.D. sometimes better than J.D. liked to think, but always to his benefit.

"He thinks he's hurting me."

Turk traced a small circle in the gravel of the roof with the toe of his shoe. "Sounds like an excuse."

"It is," J.D. shrugged. "But at least I understand it. I don't want him to forget Ben. And I can't make him want to be happy."

"Him and Carla, I swear they'll worry to death protecting people," Turk said, lips turned down in a frown. "I'm not any better. You know I went to ‘Nam cause I thought you wouldn't be able to handle it. I wanted to look out for you."

"You did," J.D. said, hoping he landed closer to reassuring than demeaning. "How do you think I knew how to live on condensed milk and bugs for three months?"

"If that's a joke about my mom..."

"I wouldn't dare!"

Turk let out a soft chuckle, rubbing the back of his head. "You, uh, you tell him about all that?"

"Huh?" J.D. thought about Margaret Turk, and family dinners in Riverside, and knew within a moment that wasn't what Turk was asking about. He waited for the familiar anger and the buzzing to come, but he felt an odd wash of calm instead. "I haven't told anyone."

"It's all public record." Turk scratched behind his ear with a finger absently. "Specially after that POW push with the Nixon campaign."

"Don't remind me," J.D. said under his breath. "Turk, how come you…?" He let the sentence hang, unsure how to ask what he meant without seeming ungrateful or jealous.

And because Turk knew him, he understood. "I get the nightmares sometimes. Nothing as bad as Carla's, more like...," he considered. "Remember that pop up hospital we found in the woods? When we had to set up and it felt--"

"Surreal?"

"Yeah," Turk nodded. "I dream like that. Hazy and just a lot of feelings, you know? Sometimes I wake up and I smell, like, water. Carla'll be in the shower or it'll be raining. I don't have the flashbacks or anything though." He held out an arm, a pleased beam on his face that bordered on arrogant. "Steady hands. Lucky me."

J.D. slapped a hand over Turk's outstretched own and Turk used the movement to pull him into a one-armed hug.

"You gonna be okay?"

"I don't know," J.D. said, because it was Turk and there was no sense in lying. "Ask me after I have to host my mom for Christmas."

“Oy vey.”

J.D. wondered if his mother would mind him celebrating her ex-husband's Hanukkah before their Christmas, if Perry would be uncomfortable coming back to a more decorated house. He quickly decided he didn't care what either of them thought, carrying two armfuls of purchases back to the apartment on his way back from work. Blue plateware and a table cover, enough candles to burn down the building, and a tacky 'HAPPY HANUKKAH' banner, with each letter pasted on a dreidl made of construction paper.

He finished hanging the banner before he saw the note beside the television, under the remote. J.D. could see where the word _Dolly_ had been crossed through, nearly illegible and, below:

_J.D.,_

_Leaving for Paige's straight from work. Number's on the back of this sheet. Jordan has it too._ _Merry Christmas. Or Happy Hanukkah, whatever kid. Take care._

_Perry_

Like their first December in Vietnam, when Turk had taken cans to make a menorah, J.D. looked across the banner from blue to white to blue, and felt recognized. He looked around the rest of the empty apartment, remembered the tumultuous events of the night before, and felt suffocated.

* * *

J.D. fell into a routine for the next two weeks. He went home to his dark, decorated apartment after every shift, lit every candle, taking special time over the menorah, took a shower, and packed an overnight bag. Besides Kelso, who he had to tell, Carla had been the only other person Perry had spoken to before he went to his sister's, calling Jordan from Lancaster when he arrived. So it wasn't a shock that Carla spent the next few days after, trying to convince J.D. to spend the night with she and Turk. He did a few times but more often he would climb the stairs, one floor, to reach the elevator and ride up to Jordan's, crawling into the loft and reading until his eyes burned.

If he fell asleep, he’d wake up, get dressed, and go to work.

This morning, J.D. narrowly avoided a bedpan on the way in to see Mister Matthews.

"Whoa!" He ducked inside the door. "Glenn! What's going on?"

"Dorian," Glenn fell back on his bed with a huff. "Thought you were someone else."

J.D. hushed a nurse in the hall, asking if she needed to call someone. She handed him the bedpan and doubled back to the station with an apprehensive glance in Mister Matthew's direction.

"I get it," J.D. slid the pan halfway under the bed with his foot. "You've been knocked out a while. How are you feeling?"

"Like hell," Glenn said with a crooked smile. "But things are less...foggy." J.D. made a mental note to ask him what he meant by that later, when he had been awake for more than twenty four hours. "I'm going to have an amazing scar. Appreciate getting this one Stateside."

J.D. pulled up a chair next to his bed. "I know what you mean. Pretty sure the worst I had done over here was a skinned knee from when my brother tried to teach me hockey. The rest are all stories no one wants to hear."

"Oh yeah? Got some nasty ones, Doc?"

J.D. laughed. "What did I just say?"

"Don't be shy," Glenn waved him closer, lifting an arm to show the bottom of his arm and the long gash that J.D. was intimately familiar with by now. "Bit of shrapnel stuck in for a day and a half before they could remove it. What you got?"

J.D. considered the man laid out on the hospital bed, head empty of most of a tumor and full of memories and Agent Orange, showing off his scar like a mark of pride. J.D. wasn't ashamed of his own, but he certainly wasn't proud of them either, and thinking of them it took a while to decide which he considered _his worst_. Eventually he bent at the waist to undo the laces of his shoes.

At the time, he thought he heard Glenn say his name, then repeat it from a distance. His hands hovered over his socked feet and shook, and shook, and...

Later, he wouldn't remember that part. He would remember waking up in the on-call room to the sound of Carla's voice. She sounded angry in a way she hadn't since he first met her.

"--and what the hell makes you so special?" J.D. rolled over to answer, quickly closing his eyes again when he saw she was on the phone, hand wrapped around the cord and fingers curled into a tight fist. If she was trying to be quiet, she wasn't trying hard. The person on the other end of the line must have been arguing with her, and J.D. wondered who would have the nerve. "I don't care, Perry."

_Oh._

"Get mad, get drunk, leave the city. At least have the courage to admit you can't do it on your own. I know I couldn't." J.D. cracked an eye open to watch her throw the phone back at the receiver. It slammed to the floor and she stared at it as though it had wronged her.

"Carla," J.D. propped himself up on an elbow. Carla startled, scrambling for the phone and setting it gently on the receiver before moving to sit beside J.D. on the bed.

"Bambi, Jesus, you scared us." Carla pulled the blanket over J.D. a little higher. He wasn't cold, but he felt like his brain was wrapped in wool, so he wasn't going to complain.

"Sorry," he said, and tried to smile.

"Kelso wants to talk to you."

"I'm going to sleep through that, if he doesn't mind."

" _I_ mind," she said, placing one hand on his shoulder and the other on his head. "But rest while you can."

J.D. closed his eyes and hummed. The next time he woke, Kelso was reading a paper in the corner chair. The glance the older man threw at him was, if only briefly, worried then completely exasperated.

"Dorian."

"Doctor Kelso."

“Nurse Turkleton brought you here.” Kelso folded up his paper. "You were screaming loud enough to bring down the hospital. We'll be lucky if Mister Matthews doesn't sue."

"I don't think that's likely to happen," J.D. said, mentally filing away the bit about _screaming_ to examine later. "Sir."

Kelso stood, giving him a much more serious look. "Doctor Dorian, I'm going to be asking you to take a leave of absence for the next few weeks. We won't call it a suspension on your record, but I want you to know, that's what _I'm_ calling it," he tapped his temple, "up here."

"I understand, sir."

"And _after_ you take suspension," he continued when J.D. had acquiesced. "You need to consider going to see a mental health professional. Or, hell, go home, catch a game!”

J.D. regarded Kelso’s nervous smile silently. The earlier concern had appeared, replacing what had appeared to be stern condemnation. He cleared his throat, seemingly caught in a moment of softness. J.D. flipped to his back, remembering Kelso’s declaration, that he needed doctors like J.D. at Sacred Heart to do the job he couldn’t. Maybe none of them could.

“There’s no shame in it, son,” Kelso said, softly, catching J.D. completely off guard.

“I’m not ashamed.” J.D. felt his brows press together. “I’m just...tired.”

“Then go home and get some shut eye, sport.”

J.D. closed his eyes with a complacent nod, privately feeling he had already rested enough.

* * *

J.D. observed a lot about Elliot and Jordan's relationship during his time in the loft. Jordan gave advice disguised as commands, and Elliot listened with mild balking. Elliot talked, and talked, and _talked_ , and while J.D. didn't have the energy to engage her, Jordan seemed to enjoy the chatter. Maybe it was having other people around, regardless of what they talked about. She didn't appear to care about the books on her shelf, that much J.D. had noticed, from the dust and the way the spines creaked.

Midway through December, Elliot dragged a tree between the television and the table and, knowing what he now knew, J.D. could see how pleased Jordan was by the short, twiggy thing.

Elliot climbed the steps, resting her chin on her crossed arms. "If I go get a turkey will you preheat the oven?"

J.D. set his book aside. "There's an oven?" Elliott rolled her eyes. "Yes, I think I can manage keeping the place intact for the next half an hour."

Both heads swung towards the hall at the sound of the door slamming and Jordan's heels approached.

“I found a Christmas elf outside the door.” J.D. heard before he glanced over the side, past Elliot’s shoulder. Perry stood in the center of the living room, holding Jordan’s elbow and softly demanding she be more careful as she undid the strap of her right shoe, slinging it somewhere in the corner. “Aw, is the elf angry?”

Perry stopped his grumbling, eyes flicking around the room, assessing. “Growing your own broom wood now, Jordan? How economical!”

Elliot leaned back in to hiss, " _Turkey,_ " before disappearing from J.D.’s line of sight and reappearing by the coat closet, exiting as quietly as she could.

J.D. turned his attention to the two below him. Jordan had removed her other shoe and was saying something in too low a register for J.D. to make out.

“Jordan?” He said, catching her attention and letting his arms hang over the side of the loft. It took a second longer for Perry to look at him and, when he did, it wasn’t to make direct eye contact. “Could you do me a favor and turn the oven to...whatever it is you preheat turkeys to?”

“Why?” Jordan crossed her arms, clearly frustrated, then genuinely confused.

“Elliot’s buying a turkey.” J.D. retreated back to the loft, doing his best to ignore the uneasy feeling being in the same room as Perry had brought.

He heard Jordan make an irritated noise. “Is it...200?”

“It’s 450, you heathens.” J.D. peaked over to watch Perry react with his entire body, hands tossed in the air and head thrown back in frustration. He pushed past Jordan towards the kitchen. “I’ll do it.”

“You have fun with that. I’m going to shower.”

J.D. picked up his book again, listening to the sounds of Jordan’s door close, Perry working in the kitchen. The longer nothing was said, the more questions wriggled up and ate at J.D.’s thoughts. Were things back to a relative normal? Was _he_ supposed to say something? _What was Perry doing here?_

As though summoned, a tuft of red curls appeared at the top of the loft steps. Perry paused there before he made the final push to show his face. J.D. did the world’s worst impression of a man not caring, eyes hovering on the same word (which, in this case, was the appropriate _disquiet_ ).

“Wasn’t expecting you back until after Christmas,” he said.

"Carla called me."

"More than once?"

"Ah," Perry laughed. "Yeah. More than a few times. Why didn't you?"

"Well I heard from a very close friend that you were bad for me. Or I'm bad for you, I forget what all was said."

"Sounds like an unreliable source."

J.D. did look up then, straight into an expression on Perry’s face which J.D. could only describe as _contrite_. Perry was _not_ contrite. "I'd call him volatile."

"Move." Perry made a waving motion with his hand and J.D. set his book aside, pressing as far as he could against the bannister, making a space for Perry to fold himself between the small stack of books and J.D..

"How's your sister?"

"Crazier'n I am. Where's your mom?"

"Still in Ohio. I meant to call her," J.D. said, letting the unspoken ‘but’ hang. "I decorated the apartment."

"I saw. Looks nice. Very...blue." Perry wormed an arm around J.D.'s back, turning his head to examine the spines of Jordan’s books. He ran a finger down them, stopping at a worn copy of _Green Grows the Lilacs_.

“Jordan told me Ben took you to see that three times,” J.D. motioned to the book with his chin. “ _Oklahoma._ ”

“No,” Perry worked the book out from the middle of the stack. “Just the once, then I made him go with Danni. She’s thinking of--,” he cut himself off with a laugh, holding the book to his chest.

“What?”

“She's thinking of  _Hello Dolly._ ”

“You're kidding,” J.D. said, chuckling too.

“I am not,” Perry ran a hand down his face, chest rising and falling with stuttered laughter. When they were both quiet, he said: “What the hell happened to you over there, J.D.?"

_Propellers spin._

“I know a bit. About Dan, and Saigon. Jordan has all your letters in this box she doesn’t know I know about. She’s secretly sentimental like that. But, after, there’s this space where you didn’t write. Then you were home. Three new medals and a sergeant.”

_Pop can against the side of the mountain._

Perry had already made short work of J.D.’s personal space, but he tilted on his side to lean in further anyway. "I also know, courtesy of sharing a bed with you for some months, give or take, that you've got a brand spanking new broken leg, a gunshot wound in your shoulder that wasn't there when I left, and lacerations on your feet that don't have any right to be on a combat medic."

_Boots land, knee deep in water._

"They took my boots," J.D. said, mouth moving before his brain could catch up. "I kept thinking: that one shouldn't have died. He was stronger than me, faster. And then I woke up, and it was night, and we kept walking. By the time they got us to where they wanted us, the soles of my feet looked like little grains of rice."

“Stop,” Perry wrapped a hand around his bicep, pulled him back down. J.D. didn't remember sitting up. “I knew I had to look out for you, I just...didn't know.  Honestly I think there were things I didn't want to know.”

“There were things _I_ didn't want you to know.” J.D. said, feeling a sense of clarity return to him. “Not just about what happened after you left. But,” he swallowed. “My brother, and how scared I was half of the time. Or the times when I wasn’t scared and I just felt...calm? I don’t think I knew what it was until I came back here and everything was…,”

“Loud?” Perry made a sound from the back of his throat. “Busy?”

“And too slow at the same time, yeah,” J.D. said. “Jordan told me you tried to take care of her, when you got out of the hospital.”

“Of course I did.” Perry said. “She’s a demon spawned from the depths of Hell, but she’s still Ben’s sister.”

“She said it was because you didn’t know how to take care of yourself,” J.D. continued and Perry looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“...that’s fair.”

“I think I understand why you did that. Tried to do it with you.”

“Thankless job, that one.”

“Perry, I don’t want you to thank me.” J.D.  shook his head. “I just...love you.”

Perry placed his hand on the back of J.D.’s neck. J.D. couldn’t tell if his expression was pleased or resigned. Maybe it was both. “I know,” he said.

Jordan’s door closed down the hall, followed by a shout. “You staying for dinner, glamour muscles?”

“Not if you’re cooking,” he called back.

“If you’re staying, _you’re_ cooking.”

“In fairness,” J.D. tilted his head. “You were the only one who knew how to preheat the oven.”

“Jesus,” Perry said under his breath.

It was...surreal, eating an impromptu feast with Perry, across from Elliot and Jordan. Elliot seemingly agreed, looking as though she wanted to be anywhere but there. Perry and Jordan looked at their plates for long moments between chewing.

“Do you remember,” Perry  eventually said, lips working into a purse before he smiled at Jordan. “That Christmas dinner your dad tried to pass off rabbit for turkey?“

Jordan’s face lit up. “Oh gosh, you _were_ there for that! I thought Mom was going to kill him.” She pitched her voice in a clear imitation of her mother. “What the hell, Paul, did you _catch_ this? We don’t know _where_ this has been!”

“Ben said,” Perry caught his chuckle with a curled fist. “He said, ‘Daddy, what if this rabbit had _cancer_?’”

Jordan bent over her plate, small gasping laughs buried into her napkin. “Such an asshole.”

“I thought your dad was going to throw up.”

“Barry,” Elliot spoke up, voice cracking. She coughed to clear her throat. “Barry, that’s, um, my brother, he used to hunt turkeys with my dad every November. It was a pretty terrible hobby, I would have yelled at him about it, but I knew how much he hated it too. I think it was the only thing he and my dad had in common.”

J.D. realized this was the first he’d heard her talk about her brother as a person. Until now, he had existed, to J.D., as Barry the Idea. Watching Elliot tell the story, and given his own experience, maybe it was easier on her that way too.

“He was…,” she motioned to J.D. and Perry. “I mean he liked men. I don’t think he’d have ever admitted it. Enlisted to prove what a big man he was to our dad.” Elliot waved an arm over the spread across the table. “But, anyway...turkeys.”

“Jesus, Barbie.” Perry threw another slice on her plate. “Lighten up.”

“Oh shut up, Perry.” Jordan kicked him under the table. “What about you, J.D.? Any _fun_ family stories for the table?”

J.D.’s mouth felt dry around the turkey, surprisingly moist for the small amount of preparation time Perry had. Of the three others at the table, Jordan was doing the best job at ignoring J.D.'s drawn out silence, flicking quick glances between bites of her mashed potatoes.

"There's nothing wrong with a peaceful, _quiet_ meal, Jordan," Perry said, a perfect escape if J.D. wanted to take it. In truth, J.D. _wanted_ to talk about Dan.

"There was one night," J.D. said, rubbing his fingers against the fabric of Jordan's elegant tablecloth. "Dan wanted to sneak out of the house and spend time with his girlfriend, so he tried to convince my parents he was having an allergic reaction to the food."

Elliot was smiling again. "How did that work out?"

"As well as you think," J.D. said. "He hid in bed and moaned a lot. Promised me he'd get me and my friends invited to some party if I would vouch for him, keep my parents distracted. I didn't really care about parties, so the second I got bored of hanging out with Ma and Pa Dorian, I ratted him out. He stole my paper route money for the next week until I told on him again."

"You snitch," Jordan nudged his ankle under the table, a tease of a kick.

Perry laughed into his drink. "You had a paper route?"

"I was an industrious lad!"

The table's players led themselves to happier subjects as the evening wore on to night. Reflecting back, the story he had told about Dan was silly and small, not even worth mentioning except he had been asked and...he had been _able_. Something in his stomach uncurled at the thought.

It didn't make sense to stay at Jordan's, he knew. But the thought of following Perry out of the door and down to their shared apartment made him equally uncomfortable, if only for the uncertainty that dogged both of their steps. This left J.D. fiddling with the handle of Jordan's coat closet, fingers of his other hand clasped around his overnight bag.

"I know you were in the middle of that book. It won't hurt my feelings if the ghoul lets you stay," Perry said. "Is that how it works when a vampire owns a home? Reverse vampirism, where _she_ has to invite _you_ in?"

"You like her, stop being such an asshole."

"I'm an asshole _because_ I like her."

"You must really love me then," J.D. said, and Perry looked up from tying his shoes with a raised eyebrow and an overall amused expression. "I want to go back with you, but then what?"

Perry went back to tying his shoes. "Familiar question."

"Different answer?"

"I still don't think this," Perry stood and motioned between them, "is a good idea. For _either_ of us. But dammit, Carla's right...she usually is...I've tried pushing pretty much everyone I know out of my life and it's just--"

J.D. waited, skin sweating where the leather of his bag made contact with his palm. Finally Perry spoke again.

"I can't do this on my own."

"Nobody wants you to."

"Well," Perry shoved his hands in his coat pockets. "I thought I could. Anyway I think I said what I came to say."

In J.D.’s mind he was already back up in the loft. He was in Đông Hà, hand around the familiar wood of a knife. He was in Pleiku, chewing over the first words his Sergeant ever spoke to him. And in all of these places, he was awake, alone, and so would Perry be; downstairs, surrounded by blue and white decorations he didn’t understand.

It was that last thought, more than anything, that pushed J.D. to follow Perry to the elevator, the other man looking over his shoulder only once, and seemingly too surprised to make mention of the action. They’d made their mistakes during the war--with men they’d tried to heal, with one another--and what it took to forgive themselves for that, time, and therapy, and medicine they were barely scratching the surface of, J.D. didn’t know. But _these_ mistakes, the ones they were making today….

Perry had come back. Perry cared about his men. J.D. would follow him.

* * *

J.D. felt his shoulder nudged, hard enough to wake him.

“Wake up,” Perry said, voice low. J.D. sat up and heard the fan turn on above him. Small droplets of sweat broke out over his skin, the cold air retelling the story of what they'd done the night before. He relived the feeling through his pores, each drop a small recollection.

“Get dressed.”

J.D. took the order without question, led by old instinct, feet landing on the floor and rising only to feel the solid pops in his ankles. He was halfway through his morning routine when his foggy brain caught up with what his body was doing. He looked up in question. “Where to, Perry?”

“Outside. I rented a car.”

“You know how to drive?”

“I don't own a car, that doesn't mean I don't know how to drive.”

“Yeah, but I saw you in an M48."

“I didn't rent a tank, J.D.," Perry said. "And I won't be maneuvering over a dead man unless you keep annoying me."

"Where are we going?"

"It's a surprise," he said, disappearing around the frame of the door. J.D. stared at the space until, a moment later, he reappeared. “Pack for a week.”

 _Thank you_ , J.D. mouthed, turning back to his drawers. He finished packing before Perry, using the time to heat up a slice of toast and dial Jordan’s number.

 _“He didn’t tell you where you’re going?”_ Her voice was tinny through the line, but he could tell he’d woken her up.

J.D. juggled the toast, still hot to the touch, and settled it on his plate. “Nothing yet. He say anything to you last night?”

_“Nothing. Just wanted to know how you’d been.”_

J.D. opened the top cupboard and reached for the jam, thought of how much work finding a clean knife and slathering on the sticky substance would be weighed against his overall drowsiness, and slowly closed the cupboard. “You think we’re going to Disneyland?”

He heard a soft snort come down the line. J.D. smiled and bit into his toast.

* * *

The car was a Corolla, robin’s egg blue. J.D. stared at it and tried to keep his expression neutral.

Perry tossed his bags in the back with a growl. “I told you it’s a rental.”

“I like the color.” J.D. shoved his own bag in beside Perry’s. He didn’t say anything else. It was an ugly car.

"Get some sleep," Perry said, keys in the ignition and eyes on the road. “I’ll wake you up for lunch.”

J.D. opened his mouth to argue and blew air out through pressed lips instead. He pushed his seat back as far as it could go, feet crossed on top of the dashboard, and closed his eyes.

When he woke up they were five hours out, in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Burger King or McDonalds, pick your poison,” Perry said, pulling off the interstate.

“You decide.” J.D. dug into his pocket for some change. Half of it he threw on the center console for Perry, the rest he palmed. “But drop me off near a payphone and _tell me where we’re going_.”

Perry turned into the parking lot of a local grocer, expression concerned.

“I’m calling Carla,” J.D. explained, opening his door when the car parked. “She’s going to have a lot more questions than Jordan did.”

“We’re going to Ohio,” Perry said, clearly put out.

J.D. paused, fingers on the door handle. “I’m sorry?”

“Cincinnati,” he clarified. “I thought you oughta see your mom.”

“Oh my God.” J.D. settled back in his seat. “You thought...Perry this is a _thirty two_ hour drive.”

“Twenty seven now.” Perry tapped his hands against the steering wheel. J.D. rolled his eyes, ready to open the door when Perry spoke again. “Did I ever tell you my favorite memory about you?”

J.D. turned slightly, shook his head.

“Medical facilities at Phù Cát,” he said, and J.D.’s mind was there in an instant, though everything was faded and noiseless. “I wasn’t fit to be human after Ben died, let alone command you men. The things I thought about doing--”

“You didn’t.”

“You can thank yourself for that.” Perry crossed his arms. “I remember taking you aside one day, when a new batch of refugees came in. You know we don’t know if they’re with us or VC, I think I said. Better to wait the rough ones out instead of let ‘em use up all the supplies.”    

“I don’t remember that.” J.D. looked at the fraying, gray roof of the Corolla. “Funny. I thought I remembered everything you ever said to me.”

“You have a tendency to censor the worst of me,” Perry said on an exhale. “Unsurprising.”

“What did I say?”

“That it wasn’t your job, deciding who to heal or not.” Perry stared at his lap. “It was the first time you’d pushed back about an order in...,” He rubbed a hand along his brow. “Well I can’t remember you outright saying _no_ to anything else. But you were right to do it.”

J.D. stared at his own lap. “Thank you.”

“It got me to thinking, we did our best when we were forced into small quarters, didn’t we? Backed into a corner, so to speak.”

J.D. leaned over, unthinking, and kissed Perry where his cheekbone curved, small hairs pricking his lips. “I’m going to call Carla.”

They ate in Albuquerque and found a hotel in Alanreed, Texas with too-firm mattresses that smelled like cement and wet wallpaper. The next day was breakfast in Oklahoma City, lunch in Springfield, Missouri, and dinner in St. Louis. J.D. took his turn driving when Perry hit the rumble strips on the road halfway through barren Oklahoma highway.

J.D. stretched in his seat, hearing a muted pop from low in his back. “We’re not going to make it to Cincinnati ‘til midnight at this rate.”

“You wanna stop another night?” Perry said, forehead against the glass, one eye closed.

“I’m punch drunk enough to keep going. You?”

Perry nodded, sitting up with a yawn. “O-high-o. You like hockey, Newbie?”

“Only the local teams. My dad took us to see them.”

“My dad told me baseball was the only man's sports.”

“You like the Red Wings,” J.D. pointed out.

Perry’s top lip pulled back in what J.D. thought might be a smile, though it was one that seemed to say, _Yeah, and I showed him_. “I sure do.”

“Dan and me liked the Cincinnati Swords. I can't remember dad's favorite team.” J.D. searched his fuzzy memories. “The Mohawks?”

“We'll have to catch a game while we’re in town.”

“Yeah.” J.D. threw him a grin. “Yeah, okay.”

“And we’ll have to go to, uh, _Perry's_ Island.” Perry closed his eyes again. “Always wanted to see that place.”

“It’s Perry’s Victory on South Bass Island. _And_ it’s four hours from my mom’s house.”

“Perry’s _Victory_? Even better.” Perry laughed.

“You're such an egomaniac.” J.D. shook his head, smiling, and Perry laughed harder.

* * *

It was one in the morning when they reached Cincinnati and J.D. drove them straight to the graveyard where Dan was buried, let the car idle for a few minutes while he decided what to say.

“How long did it take you to talk to Ben?”

“Few months after the hospital.” Perry scratched his neck. “Thought I owed it to him after the hell I gave Jordan. But she, uh, she can’t. It’s harder for her and Danni.”

“I still don’t know what to say to him.”

Perry nodded, opened his mouth, closed it, and kept nodding.

“Want me to go with you?”

“No.” J.D. took a breath, then another. “Keep the car running.”

When J.D. came back, Perry was nearly asleep again, waking fully at the slam of the car door. J.D. swiped at his eyes, half-knowing that any liquid there was probably a frozen tack on his face.

“You all right?”

He nodded. “Fine. I told him about the time Turk got the cherry canon cockers to look for fallopian tubing for inside the turrets of tanks.”

Perry chuckled. “Always a classic.”

“You know,” J.D. shifted the car out of park. “I always thought that prank worked better when the grunts let one of us say it. Sounded more official.”

“It’s the doctor voice. No one questions it.”

“Speaking of questions,” J.D. raised his eyebrows. “Ready to meet my mom?”

His mother was too tired to greet them with more than a smile and a confused glance down the hallway once Perry had disappeared into Dan’s old room. J.D. waved her back to bed and she looked settled enough for the moment.

To Perry’s immense credit, he didn’t try to sneak into J.D.'s childhood bedroom until close to morning, when it would be reasonable to convince his mother they had convened there and waited for her to wake. There was a pile of boxes that she had, evidently, been packing to send him, and Perry made it his mission to start rifling through them as soon as he sat on the bed.

“You still have this old thing?” J.D. looked up from his records, where he’d been parsing down which ones he wanted to take back, to see Perry holding a beaten leather journal.

J.D. sat beside him, weighed down by lack of sleep and held there by nostalgia. “My book.”

“ _Shirley_ ,” Perry read his page aloud. “Ben tell you to write that?”

J.D. reached up to straighten out an errant curl at the base of Perry’s neck, only to see it spring back, a little lifelessly this early in the morning. Perry snorted, patting down what must be some awful cowlick at the back of J.D.’s own head with one hand and flipping through the journal with the other. _Woody, Duster, Hillbilly, Baldy, Nursepinosa, Bambi, Old Man, Benji_ …

Perry’s thumb caught on a slick series of photographs wedged between the pages, and he slowly pried them out. J.D. recognized them at once; the few of Ben’s photos he’d managed to keep for himself.

“Almost forgot what you looked like without this much fluff on your head.” Perry messed with J.D.’s hair again, this time more deliberately. “Oh...wow….”

It took a moment to register what Perry was looking at; an aerial shot of Hạ Long Bay, dotted with naval ships. The picture was a faded black and white, but J.D. saw the emerald waters staring back at him. The mines that floated just below the surface, destroying the beauty of everything they touched.  

“Ever wish we could have seen it before all of this?”

Perry considered the square between his fingers. “Never thought about it,” he admitted. “I always thought it was beautiful though, despite everything.”

J.D. silently agreed. He had seen more of its northern landscape and even upon thinking he’d not live to see the next day, he contented himself that he’d die to a beautiful sight; the horizon a wash of unbelievable colors. At the time, the thought could have as easily been attributed to the blood loss.

“Ben could make a war zone look enchanting.”

Perry nodded, shaking the pictures in his direction. “I appreciate you keeping these.”

“ _One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone_.” J.D. took the top picture from the pile. Perry gave him a searching look. “ _A Murder is Announced_ by Agatha Christie,” he explained.

Perry looked down at the small island resting just outside the shore of Hạ Long Bay. “ _History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,_ ” Perry said and, when he received a quizzical look in his own direction, clarified, “ _Ulysses_.”

“You _did_ read it.” J.D. nudged him with his shoulder, flipped to the next photo. Perry and Carla, grinning, arms slung over their knees and over one another, relaxed from cheap rice wine and empty bottles at their feet. “ _It's what's in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy_ ,” he recited, a line that had brought him great comfort and great pain in equal measure _._

The next photo was of Perry, and one Ben had given J.D. long before Operation Attleboro. He hadn’t understood at the time why Ben didn’t keep it for himself. It was simple, the Sergeant guarding the foxhole J.D. had built for the three of them, the top of J.D.’s helmet peeking out from inside. They had hardly known one another then.

“ _People in the dark are quite different, aren’t they?_ ”

Perry slid his fingers through J.D.’s. “If you’re looking for another quote from me, you’re gonna be disappointed. But...I do know all the words to _Put On Your Sunday Clothes._ ”

J.D.’s joy grew until it lit up his face and became something audible, and Perry joined in laughing, the feeling almost tangible between them.

* * *

“Dorian!”

“Good to see you too, Glenn.” J.D. tossed his clipboard on the end of the bed. “Though it looks like you’ll be leaving us soon.”

“You know I used to be a janitor before the war.” He swiped a finger along the closest surface, inspecting under his nail for dirt. “In case you guys have an opening.”

“I'm sure Kelso can work something out. We like you.”

“I threw a bedpan at you.”

“People aren't always themselves when they have a penny-sized tumor lodged in their brain. You also told me you can control birds.”

“Oh that part’s true. Learned it from a mama-san at the B4 Front.”

J.D. snorted, and Matthews started laughing too. J.D. thought of what he wanted to say, what he couldn’t say, even to his brother’s headstone. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you what happened when I was over there, yet.”

“I understand.”

“I can tell you about my brother,” J.D. offered, pulling the small seat in the room closer to Glenn’s bed.

“I bet there's some fun stories there.” He motioned to J.D.’s knee where J.D. knew a bit of scar tissue sat. “How bout you tell me about your first, disastrous attempt at hockey?”

“A very good place to start, friend.” J.D. leaned back, settling into the telling. “Dan was a decent brother, but a teacher? Eh…”

He sat there with Glenn, and spoke until his hips felt uncomfortably stiff. Sunlight poured from the window behind his bed across the light blue blanket. They in no way resembled the lapping waves of China Beach, save their hue, but J.D. thought of the shores anyway.

“J.D.!” A sharp whistle interrupted his story, drawing his attention to the door. Perry nodded at Mister Matthews. “Lunch time, let’s go.”

“I hear you,” J.D. waved him off with both hands, only standing when the other man disappeared down the hallway. “I’ll come back to see you off, all right? And I promise I’ll talk to Kelso for some sort of placement after your recovery.”

Mister Matthews raised a hand, smiling lazily. “Tạm biệt, Doc.”

“Tạm biệt, Glenn.”   

In the hallway, the hospital teemed with humanity, beeps of radical technology and a swell of new life. Sacred Heart housed an existence different from the humid bush, or a childhood in snowy Ohio. J.D. would call it clinical, by its nature. He’d call it nurturing, for what its progenitors were trying to do here.

He would call it--

“Over here, J.D.!”

Carla was waving a hand and, as soon as Elliot saw him, she joined in at a more frenetic pace. Beside them, Turk and Perry were arguing about something directed at the small, static-filled television hanging in the corner of the room. When J.D. drew closer, Perry pushed out a chair for him without missing a beat.

He’d been back for well over a year, but only now would he would call what he saw the World.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading! I feel bad for these two for saying this has been terribly fun to write but it has been! I've enjoyed it immensely and I appreciate everyone who stopped to read it and enjoy this universe with me. Again, many thanks <3

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](http://feoplepeel.tumblr.com)!


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